Insulated From Science--But Conducting Ourselves Well!

For reasons best known only to Dante, I am dubbed as the science and math "master" of the household.  Those who know me, we'll just wait until you stop laughing before continuing.  Ready?  No?  How about now?  OK.  El Hijo is the history go-to guy -- and he really deserves that title.  But as far as I can tell, the only talents I have in the math and science department are two things:  1)  I can explain in kid terms what's going on (after I've already cussed and snorted around about how it actually works myself) and 2) I am the Mistress of We Shall Never Give Up, Dammit.  The last one applies mainly to math.  Dante loves science, and it is never hard to get him to work on it.  Math he hates with a bloody raging passion, much like most other schoolwork.  So, part of my task as Math Mistress is to make sure I stay on him to get it done.  Sometimes I want to give up, because it's a real pain in the ass to make somebody do something day in and day out that they just don't want to do.  But a few things I read recently made me glad I did.  

Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers is a fantastic work of statistics and science applied to everyday life, in the same scope as something like Freakonomics.  Gladwell looks at success and what makes a person truly successful, and the results are part common sense and part, well, astonishing.  He finds, for example, that intelligence is only so useful; it's more of a threshold rather than a cumulative advantage.  So,  you only need so much intelligence to be a successful person, and that measure is about the IQ it takes to get into college.  More IQ after that is practically negligible when it comes to successful invention.  What kicks in after the intelligence threshold is creativity and emotional/people skills, along with the kind of environment and parenting you had as a kid.  Then it gets even more interesting, because he proves very conclusively that successful people in school are successful because of their birth date -- you need to get the book to see the data charts, etc -- but in a nutshell, the cut off dates for school entry favor students whose birthday is soonest after the cut off date, because they mature far more quickly than those "summer babies" ever do.  Then what kicks in next is cultural conditioning to practice.  He proves that children from cultures where emphasis is on staying with a task much longer do far better in areas like math, which requires you to really work through sometimes very abstract concepts and not give up.  It's an incredible read.

It also means that being Queen of the Mixed Fractions is critical for Dante's success.  It means I'm doing a good job when I make him sit down for that extra practice and drill every goddamn day of the week except Saturday, because I'm teaching him among other things to stick with the process.  Now, Dante does not have exceptional grades, in spite of how much extra parent involvement he has -- and he has a lot.  I'm not bragging so much as I am complaining, I guess!  LOL.  But he's surrounded by books and reading material on everything from luchadors to dinosaurs, we practice spelling with him every night, math drill, extra practice for tests, reading and vocabulary comprehension -- hell, we're basically still part time homeschooling.  And he honestly doesn't have the grades to show for it, partly because he likes to rush things, partly because he's mildly dyslexic, which when combined with rushing through things produces fascinating words made out of numbers and letters that don't seem to exist in the English alphabet.  But it makes me wonder what life would be like for him without all that parental involvement -- I suppose it would be like the time he nearly failed the third grade because his dad decided to not have that much involvement.  But it also makes me wonder how many other parents with kids in public schools are doing the same thing as we are.  

Maybe it's just because public school forums are not really the way Dante learns best.  Maybe it's easy for other kids, I don't know.  But I know it's hard for me as a parent just trying to keep up with what he's doing in school.  Trying to remember the rules for multiplying mixed fractions when you haven't done that since the fifth grade yourself, lo these many twenty-one-ish years ago, it's like I'm teaching myself stuff all over again.  That was especially true for science tonight, and the whole reason I got around to writing this post.  Tonight he had to bring in examples of conductors and insulators.  OK, I know what that is, but trying to explain it to an eleven year old is always kind of hard.  And then where the hell am I supposed to get copper wiring?  Rip it out of the phone?  So to the internet we go for a list of these things.  We spent a big chunk of time talking about what those examples were and why they worked, putting little samples in ziplock baggies.  Even though the teacher just wanted samples, we made a list, because there are things like "dry air" and "the human body" that obviously present baggie problems.  We talked about why radios and TVs shouldn't be near people taking a bath because of the conductivity issues with water and wet bodies.  We talked about the time one of his older cousins got shocked because he was playing the electric guitar on a concrete floor while it was wet.  But it's not like I could just pull all this stuff out of my head.  I forgot concrete was considered conductive.  I had to look it up.  So I make looking it up one of the things we do together.  And in spite of just how very much I have to look up, he still considers me the Ruler of All Things Science-y.  

And I really wondered just how many parents were doing that tonight.  Not because I want to feel special or "better" than anybody, but because it's a lot of hard work to teach a kid something, and I know there are plenty of times that I just want to quit because I'm tired or frustrated.  But it scares me to death to think of life without an education, because I've worked with people who had little to no education, and it's just such a dead end.  Not only because of your job opportunities and your income, but more importantly because of the quality of your life.  Your ability to enjoy culture and to pay attention to what people are trying to sell you or who want to govern you, all that is dependent on education.  So to me, it's not about grades, even though I wish they were higher.  It's about the process.  Because people with a good educational process have a far greater chance at a good life -- something that goes beyond an "A" in spelling.

-- DV

P.S.  To all the homeschooling parents out there -- or the "part timers" like me who put in the hours after public school is over -- hang in there.  It's worth it.