Too much homework again

[Arthur Hu <ArthurH@TANGIS.COM>]

Date sent:              Mon, 05 Jun 2000 09:22:33 -0400
To:                     71524.2205@compuserve.com
From:                   John Shepard <shep@pobox.com> (by way of Fred Battey
<fredb001@sg23.com>)
Subject:                Test Lamentations in the People's Republic

Getting CAUGHT cheating in school tests brings out Lacrimosa and
Lamentations

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 From the Washington Post Outlook Section, Sunday, June 04, 2000, B7
URL:
http://washingtonpost.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/AppLogic+FTContentServer?pagename
=w pni/print&articleid=A58640-2000Jun3

Our Stress-Tested Kids ~ by Pamela Toutant

I was surprised but not shocked by last week's front-page story about
allegations of cheating on standardized tests at an affluent Montgomery
County school--allegations that have led to the resignation of the
principal. And while the individuals involved, if proved guilty, should be
held responsible for their behavior, before we parents in Montgomery
County get into too big a huff, we would do well to consider the role we
are playing in creating and maintaining our county's culture of
achievement--an environment in which the leadership of a school in one of
the county's most privileged areas may have placed test scores above
integrity.

I think of my 9-year-old old daughter and her friend Vanessa. When I met
them at their bus the other day and asked, "So, girls, do you get to play
before your art class today," Vanessa, the smartest student in the class,
looked worried.

"We don't have time," she said.

"We have too much homework," my daughter added matter-of-factly. Swaying
under the weight of their backpacks, they trudged ahead, leaving me and
their childhood to bob in their wake while they gossiped wide-eyed about
the friend who got a "C" on her report card--the fourth-grade scarlet
letter.

Childhood, to my way of thinking, should have the whole sky to fly in.
Along with a focus on external standards for achievement, there should be
time to doodle and drift, to be silly, to learn how to be and keep a
friend--all capacities we need to draw on as adults. Hard work and
responsibility come soon enough. My concerns are not only philosophical:
Our evening and weekend family life has come to feel like home schooling,
with the research projects, science projects and various other academic
endeavors droning like white noise in the background.

While I am clearly bothered by this, I'm also ambivalent about doing
anything about it. Should my husband and I subvert this
over-focus on achievement by suggesting to our children that they blow off
their homework and play a rousing game of Monopoly with us? After all,
isn't it our role to keep them on track so they can get what they want in
life?

Should we take on their school, where we risk being branded by an
overheated meritocracy as the type of people who want to
"dumb down" education or who are willing to settle for mediocrity? Most
potent of all: Our child, for the moment anyway, has climbed to the top of
the mast. Why rock the boat?

Why? Because I am scared that at some point I will be having the kind of
conversation my friend had a few midnights ago with her sobbing
16-year-old daughter--the daughter who gets straight A's at the most
prestigious public high school in the area.

"There's too much pressure, mom. We all look like we are doing great, but
underneath we are all a mess. One of my friends is bulimic, another is
suicidal and I feel like there is nothing I can do to help them!" her
daughter cried.

"It isn't important to me that you get straight A's! We just want you to
be happy," my friend pleaded.

I overheard myself the other day colluding with the very mentality I
have come to disdain. My daughter was selecting her
activities for summer camp. "Hey," I said, smiling a little too
brightly, "why not take 'Fun With Math' at camp, give yourself a
head start in fifth grade!"

Luckily, my daughter, in her exasperated preteen tone, broke the grip:
"Yeah, right, mom."

It has always been hard to tell where the aspirations of parents leave off
and those of their children begin. But these days, extremes of parents
insisting that their children carry the weight of their ambitions are
becoming increasingly mainstream: the soccer parents of 7-year-olds
frothing on the sidelines; parents holding their 5-year-olds back from
kindergarten so they will have an edge the following year.

There is a mantra where I live: that we must prepare our children for a
more competitive world. But what is it we are afraid our children won't
get, or will miss out on, be excluded from? Jobs? Survival? The Ivy
League? The biggest SUV? Is there really more at stake in this plump
economy than there was during the Depression and two world wars?

Perhaps the careerist culture of the baby boomers has come unmoored from
any greater purpose than self-aggrandizement and, by extension, the
aggrandizement of our children.

When I asked parents at a recent neighborhood party, all of whom were
complaining about how their children's homework had taken over their
lives, why there is so much anxiety about academic achievement, one mother
pointed to deeper insecurities:

"If my kids can't keep up, they will fall behind. If they don't do well in
second-grade math, they won't get into the highest math group in third
grade. If they don't get into the honors classes in middle school, they
won't be around the smartest kids. If they don't do really well on the
SATs then they won't get into an Ivy League school."

"And so?" I pressed.

"And so," one father blurted out, "my kid would be average.
Indistinguishable. Zero name recognition."

We used to get name recognition in our extended families, religious
institutions and neighborhoods--places where we were
something more than the sum of our achievements. Now it seems that we, our
children included, often see ourselves as small fish struggling just to be
seen in an ever widening pond.

Pamela Toutant is a writer who lives in Chevy Chase.

                                  © 2000 The Washington Post Company

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