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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sam who wrote (148431)	10/29/2010 11:35:47 PM
From: epicure	Respond to of 543534

I have to say, I think poor nutrition may be one of the biggest problems facing "normal" children. We had interventions with our worst students in our academy. They weren't eating breakfast or lunch. Big surprise, right? No wonder they weren't doing well. In our interviews with the kids who were failing- middle class kids for the most part, with a few free/reduced lunch (so relatively poor children)- we found our biggest trouble makers, and students with the worst grades had no parental supervision for breakfast, and no lunch packed for lunch. Though some of them could have a free or reduced cost lunch, with only 1/2 hour for lunch, they often don't have enough time to get their lunch and eat it. I've started bringing lunches for the kids we have in "Lunchtime Tutorial Prison". I have two days a week, and the two other teachers take the other 3 days. Now that we are feeding the students, their work and behavior is improving. It's impossible to know whether it's the food that is making them better students, or the feeling of being cared for, or the help we are giving them with their studies- but students coming to school so poorly cared for did not happen as much when I was a kid growing up in Pomona. I think every kid I knew had a sack lunch packed by a stay at home mom. And many of the kids had a hot, home cooked breakfast- and dinners? Eaten together- home cooked. We can start right there with what is different now about American students. They aren't being fed properly. Secondly, they have almost zero support from their parents once they get to high school. The parents have just checked out. These kids run open loop. Not good. But with both parents working long hours, who is going to supervise the kids? No one. Add to this toxic mix the fact that today's kids would rather play video games, text and watch movies than read (and why wouldn't they? Such easy entertainment in the home wasn't available when I was a kid- so reading was pretty much a given. Not so any more.) Then combine this witches brew of family and social changes with the weird increased burdens on the schools to do all sorts of things that really aren't education, as education worked when I was a kid- and you get the mess we are in now. It's complex, and to fix it everyone would need to step up- but that's hard work, and it's SO much easier to just shout a catchy slogan, and do one stupid thing, rather than make a whole bunch of incremental, and difficult, changes (which might actually solve our problems.) I'm really tired of people throwing out brain dead simplistic answers to the complex problems in the public schools. It's not like I hold the unions and teachers harmless- but my God, parents have blown it big time. As a parent who has been doing much more than her share since my kids entered kindergarten, I'm really tired of bad parents. I'm tired of them as a parent, and I'm tired of them as a teacher,. And my guess is some of the biggest whiners about the public schools are some of the worst parents.