pktechgirlbackup: (Default)
So I quit martial arts last week, but this has yet up with my brain calendar, which still thinks Saturdays and Wednesdays are SACRED and anything I want to do must be considered in terms of what classes I would miss. My brain is also perpetually confused by the fact that I'm not trimming my nails to the quick every three days.

Semi-related: if you call a school for sick children and tell them you can tutor high school math and science, they will call you back very quickly.
pktechgirlbackup: (mittens)
Implicit in my post on intelligence versus wisdom is the idea that kids need to be educated alongside other kids with roughly the same intelligence and maturity level. And I stand by that. First of all, it's flat out easier to teach kids who know about the same amount and learn at about the same rate than kids that don't. Until we have an excess of good teachers, we have to consider the efficient use of the ones we have. Second, being noticeably smarter, dumber, less mature, or more mature than your classmates can lead to a lot of problems. At the very least it's isolating. It also means you don't get practice for the inevitable time you are the smartest/dumbest in the room.*

But cyrstalpyramid raises an excellent point in the comments of said post, which is that if you're surrounded by people like you all day, you tend to assume all the people you don't see are like you as well. This leads to all sorts of problems- not understanding why poor people eat junk food when it's cheap to eat well, without understanding the non-economic costs of doing so, and how being poor increases those costs. Calling to close payday lenders without investigating whether the alternatives of the people who use them are worse. Being shocked by the existence of people who aren't outraged by the pornoscanners. Not understanding friends who take substandard housing because their parents can't afford to loan them a security deposit. And a complete inability to understand political arguments you don't agree with.

Faced with people who are making such wrong decisions and lacking the empathy to determine why they are doing it, political discourse breaks down. I can't think of a single thing I like about Sarah Palin, but it bugs me when my mom dismisses people who do like her as Palin-bots, because doing so shuts down any chance of learning what it is these people get from her.

So we need to educate kids mostly with other similar kids, because it's more efficient and most likely to produce an environment where their effort controls the outcome, which is essential for development. But we also need not only expose them to kids dramatically unlike themselves, we need to do it in such a way that they connect with and empathize with the not-them children. This is one of the strongest arguments for sports and arts in schools that I can make.

*Animal behavior tangent: when puppies with large size differentials play, the big one usually lets the small one win at least occasionally. Part of that may be to keep the little puppy interested, but it's also hypothesized that the purpose of play isn't just to get stronger and better at hunting, it's to practice the social skills needed for both winning and losing. And honestly, if we just told gifted kids "pretend to lose so you can practice losing gracefully," I wouldn't have a huge problem with it. My preference is to put the kids in situations where they'll naturally have a decent win/loss ratio, but if you can't do that, honestly admitting what you want from them is the next best thing. The problem arises when we imply they're doing something wrong by being smart. And of course the fact that we would never tell a kid to throw a football game so he can practice losing.
pktechgirlbackup: (Default)

Me:  I'm a bad fit with my current tutee.  Can I switch?
Lady running program:  You know, I don't even think she needs tutoring, she's only in there 'cause her brother is.
Me:  She's reading several grade levels behind and doesn't know odds/evens
Lady:  Thanks for the input, but our other students are worse.  Let me talk to her teacher and see if she'd like to swap in another student instead.

First, let's all take a moment to be depressed that a nine year old who appears to not know what "first" means is getting kicked out of tutoring because she's not needy enough. 

Second, I didn't mention the gift demands to the Lady, but the fact is, I wouldn't have asked to switch if it wasn't for them.  So she's being taught that demanding things makes you lose opportunities, which seems like a good lesson, assuming she wants the tutoring and doesn't misread this as "demanding things gets you out of schoolwork".  Except  there's a lot of research showing that a sense of entitlement, in the neutral to positive sense of the word, is one of the major distinguishing features between middle class and poor children (see:  The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell).  And however much she needs to learn not to demand candy from strangers who are helping her with her homework, she also needs to learn to demand the doctor pay attention to her symptoms. 

Third, some of her issues are clearly motivational, not knowledge based, although I'm not competent to tease them apart.  And if she's viewing her tutor as a source of gifts, she's clearly not taking full advantage of the tutoring program.  So maybe her being replaced by a kid who is even further behind and/or will take fuller advantage of the tutoring is a good thing, even if it sucks for this one little girl.  Like crystalpyramid said, I can't view this as me helping one person, I have to view it as me participating with lots of other people in a system that helps lots of kids.  At a bare minimum I'm preventing the burn out of a more competent tutor while exposing kids to a female engineer.  If this kid doesn't get any more than that, that's sad, but it doesn't automatically mean the system, or I, failed.  But it's still depressing as hell.

Bonus depressing systems fact of the day, courtesy of Unequal Childhoods by Annette Larue:  middle class kids grown up in an environment where they're encouraged to meet people's eyes.  Many poor kids grow up in an environment where prolonged eye contact is an invitation to violence.  Employers think eye contact denotes trustworthiness. 

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