That Queasy Feeling: Parenting, Privacy and Blogging

A few months ago my babysitting co-op decided to hold its monthly meeting at a local Thai restaurant, and naturally talk turned to our kids, their successes and struggles. At one point in the conversation one of the mom’s said, “You know, I read your blog. As soon as I came across it I just knew it was you.”

Gulp. It was the first time that someone in real life had come across the blog and “figured it out,” albeit someone who knew the whole story having heard it in real time for the past 8 years. I suppose what rocked me was the way she said it…with a sort of warning tone. She might even have said I should “be careful.”

What exactly, I wondered, should I be afraid of? The local superintendent? Schoolyard bullies? Other moms? C. and M.? Was I–am I–being reckless? Or naive?

On the one hand, this blog is linked on Hoagiesgifted.org and other well-read blogs. I claimed this blog on Technorati and I chose, when I set it up, to make it available to search engines. I’ve participated in blogging carnivals. The whole purpose was/is to provide information and speak out on topics and issues where there were/are few first person narratives. Judging by the comments I’ve received, people seem to like what they are reading and find value in it.

On the other hand I have told virtually no one that I actually know in real life about this blog, save a few friends who have no kids, my husband’s cousin who is a writer and blogger, and my mom, who looked at it once and said all the wonk education stuff was rather over her head. On Leap Day I did a mass Hello-from-our-Family annual e-mailing and made not a mention of it, although it could have given my stats counter a serious upward bump.

In essence, I’ve tried to walk a very fine line between honesty and anonymity, specificity and generality. One serving the other. I’ve provided geographic detail, yet masked other details.

So why the queasy feeling? I’m not necessarily worried about pervy men in raincoats. It’s more the potential social or educational repercussions for my kids. It would be rather creepy for a kid or teacher to go up to one of them kids and say “I know all about you from your mom’s blog.” I would hate for my actions to impact them negatively, for them to feel used or betrayed by me, to have people be judgmental and whisper behind their backs…or worse confront them in an ugly way.

Which is why a story in last week’s Post about internet safety classes being introduced in Virginia tweaked at me:

Misunderstood text messages can lead to hurt feelings; parents, too, can dole out too many details online about their children; and risks abound in using social networking sites.

Hmm… too many details? Have I been guilty of this? I think about other blogs I’ve read that use real names for both the blogger and the blogger’s children, or even post photos. I’ve not gone that route. And what of print authors who for time immemorial have mined their private lives in service to their writing? Isn’t the first rule of good writing Write What You Know? In thirty years I might be chronicling retirement home dramas.

It seems to me that right now we’re in a very ambiguous place as to what constitutes privacy–and that there’s definitely a generational split. Some college students are essentially shrugging off vile postings about themselves on JuicyCampus.com. I look across the internet at the literally countless number of parent/mommy blogs and wonder if in a few years this kind of information will be so ubiquitous that everyone will just yawn.

“Hey, I read about the time you threw that epic tantrum at Target and then hurled Cheetos in the car. “

“Yeah, well bummer about that bedwetting.”

“Good thing we’re both in therapy now.”

Then again, there also seems to be some pulling back.

In December I was running errands when I got a call on my cell phone. “You posted my poem.” It was C. My heart dropped into my stomach and I broke out in a sweat.

Oh. My. God. She’s read the blog. “I’m coming right home,” I stammered and turned the car around. Now it’s not as if I should have been surprised. I had alluded to starting a blog. I had helped her set up a blog. I am sure she’d glanced the WordPress dashboard up on my screen from time to time. But I guess I had wanted to believe that she had refrained from reading it. What was odd, though, was that if she had been reading it, why that particular post among all the others would strike a nerve. “Mom,” she said evenly, “You should have asked. It’s my work.” And that was it. She didn’t express any outrage. She didn’t ask me to stop (I asked her if she wanted me to.).

As a matter of fact she’s commented to me recently that I need to post more often. I told her I was having some concerns about protecting her privacy. “Oh just comment on some education news story.” Which I can do. But it’s the personal perspective I have, through raising her and her sister, that IMO makes anything I have to say somewhat interesting.

Which leaves me in this ambiguous, weird place. So I’ll just add this: If you do happen to “figure out” who any of us are, please be kind. Be compassionate. And don’t hold it against my kids.

[Just came across a news story--after much searching--that deals with just this topic. From the Globe and Mail: No, I fine. I put pee-pee in toilet. The kids are mostly younger, some of these blogs are serious money making enterprises, and this quote is scary: "In a way I think of her as my property, my work of art."]

Slips are Dead

Go on. I dare you. Go to your nearby mall and try to find a slip. You remember those, right? Silky undergarments that either came in a full style that resembled a dress, or in a half style that resembled a skirt.

They’re gone, vanished–notwithstanding this New York Times article. Heck, I couldn’t even find a good photo to illustrate this post.

Why am I writing this? C. has a coming of age ceremony tomorrow. She picked up a cute H&M dress at a hip consignment store for a song, and it’s really quite modest…but it’s the tiniest bit sheer. Enough that I set out to look for a slip.

I went to Target, both the kids and grown up sections. I went to Macy’s. Ditto. I went to Victoria’s Secret and felt like a total prude asking for a slip. The salesperson was very nice and said, “You know, we do have people coming in asking for something like that, and I just send them to Macy’s.” I had to burst her bubble and tell her I had already been there. All they had were granny panties and industrial strength spandex. Jiggle is *not* the problem. I trudged down to J.C. Penney. Surely dowdy J.C. Penney would have them. No luck. Same granny panty/spandex deal.

So is it just assumed that every garment nowadays comes with the requisite lining? Or do people just not care?

Discouraged, I hiked back to Target. I even cruised the sporting clothes section to see if they might have any bicycle style shorts. Nope. In the end I picked up some colorful, sheer capri leggings that she could conceivably wear with her dress. She liked them, but is going to wear a pair of short knit shorts underneath instead.

Gifted Issues Front and Center

If you live in MoCo, a lot has been happening in the past few weeks regarding gifted issues.

Notably, a group of students from the Blair Math and Science Magnet staged a protest in Rockville against planned budget cuts. (Big kudos to them!) You can read the Post’s coverage here. And here’s a link to their website, Save the Magnets!.   Unfortunately C. and I didn’t participate, as C. had a final rehearsal for her Shakespeare play. We’re sorry we missed it because as C. says, “I always like a good protest.”

On the surface it would seem that the proposed cuts are rather minor. The Post says, “$350,000, or the equivalent of 3.5 teaching positions…part of a $10 million reduction in academic programs to balance an unavoidable increase in other costs — most notably, teacher salaries — in a tough budget year.”

But a follow-up piece in the Sunday Opinion written by a former magnet student and now teacher, “The Price of a Good Magnet Program,” digs deeper.

As an educator, I now fully appreciate the pedagogical rationale for the structure of the magnet program. A major buzzword in science education is “inquiry” — essentially the idea that students learn science best by doing science. In practice, however, I have found that too much inquiry can be frustrating for scientifically inclined students — like those in the magnet — who want to learn as much content as possible as quickly as possible. The magnet program’s structure gets around this problem by having a separate research course that is integrated into the “content-driven” courses. This research program requires students to design, analyze and report on their own experiments and culminates in an optional summer internship allowing magnet students to work with real scientists, in real laboratories, on real scientific problems — a program that has led to the magnet’s phenomenal success in the Intel Science Talent Search.

Montgomery County School Superintendent Jerry Weast asserts that his budget cuts will not change the magnet program, because they “only” increase the magnet teachers’ course loads to five courses per year — the same number as most county high school educators — rather than the current four. Such a perspective underestimates the time and effort magnet teachers put into teaching the integrated science-research program.

Frankly it’s puzzling why MCPS would go after the magnets, which play a huge role in the PR machine that is MCPS. Relatively speaking it *is* a small amount of money. Especially in light of the millions of dollars devoted to the MPCS Communications Department. One parent listserv has taken special delight in ferreting out and detailing the perambulations of various MPCS staff around the country, giving presentations at education conferences to tout the success of MCPS.

Friday, April 18, 2008:

http://www.aasa.org/conferences/iMisEventDetail.cfm?ItemNumber=9534

General Session: Maintaining Effective Media Relationships
Jack Dale, superintendent, Fairfax County Public Schools, Falls Church, Va.
Thelma Melendez de Santa Ana, superintendent, Pomona Unified School District, Pomona, Calif.
Greg Toppo, reporter, USA Today, McLean, Va.
Jerry Weast, superintendent, Montgomery County Public Schools, Rockville, Md.

At this session, you will learn how to develop and manage positive working relationships with the media. Learn how to implement a comprehensive media relations plan, including how to establish and maintain a message on behalf of your school districts.

And here’s the PowerPoint presentation given by the superintendent at a Harvard conference last year: http://www.hbs.edu/pelp/docs/Weast070620Harvard.pdf

The answer may lie in the recently announced cuts to programs at the other end of the educational spectrum. RICA (the John L. Gildner Regional Institute for Children and Adolescents) in Rockville is a special education school for students with emotional disabilities serving Montgomery County and several nearby counties in the state of Maryland.  There are several similar therapeutic schools in MCPS. Writes a parent, “This latest round of staffing cuts looks like a pattern we’ve seen before - the deterioration of special programs in MCPS. The system stops investing in programs… The referrals drop off and the quality goes down hill, then the system claims the programs don’t work. In the end they are under-utilized even though they are desperately needed. All of these cuts are part of a misguided attempt to impose a one-size-fits-all instructional model that ends up fitting none of our children — a model for continued failure that must be stopped if our children are to receive anything close to the education they deserve.”

Some may recall that last year parents of GT/LD students led an unsuccessful fight to keep open special high school learning centers programs in the high schools. You can read an example of the result here.

The average cost per RICA student for FY 2008 is $32,030.  By comparison, $350,000 from the magnets is small beans. But bottom line, all of these programs are perceived to be expensive.  Certainly there is the sentiment out there that gifted kids will turn out fine regardless, that they already are advantaged, so what are they complaining about?

Meanwhile, the Board of Education this month adopted a resolution to reconstitute its Special Education Ad Hoc Committee as a standing Committee on Special Populations. The committee is now “charged specifically with reviewing issues and instructional programs designed to meet the needs of special populations that require special education services, gifted and talented instruction, alternative programs, ESOL services, and multilingual supports.”

That one’s interesting. MCPS has repeatedly asserted that it’s “not about labels, but about services”–in essence that there are no “gifted and talented” students–and everyone can benefit from rigorous instruction delivered in a heterogeneous settting. This move seems to acknowledge that GT students do exist, that they are in fact a “special population” requiring “gifted and talented instruction.”  However if the IEP/GT/LD process is any guide, I can’t even imagine the hoops needed to “prove” that one’s student is part of a “special” GT population.

Bass-Ackward

Sorry that things have been quiet here of late. Between my increased workload and setting up a new laptop this week I haven’t had any time to blog lately, let alone get cozy with my feedreader….

Thorough readers of this blog know that one of the things I’ve been trying to do is to post periodically about C.’s schooling odyssey. I thought a retrospective chronicle might be of interest to others and besides, one can’t really understand our present without knowing all that went before.

As they used to say in the old radio dramas, “When we last left our heroine…” I had blogged about how we had had educational testing done at CTY and C. was on the brink of starting 6th grade. Which is the point from which I was going to continue. However this week I learned something that so typifies the attitude we ultimately came to know at the Middle School Magnet That Shall Not Be Named that I feel compelled to post out of order (hence the title).

I suppose I was vaguely aware that students at the Middle School Magnet That Shall Not Be Named were made to focus on their grades and scores. After all it was by going through C.’s agenda after we withdrew her that I discovered her MSA and MAP-R scores pasted onto one of the pages. The idea, she told me, was to provide a “benchmark” thereby motivating everyone to do better on the next try. But exhorting kids–who were already topping out the tests and reading at late high school levels and beyond–to “do better” in this way struck me as rather counterproductive, breeding cynicism at best and needless stress at worst. For C. it did both. I know that heavy-handed emphasis by the teachers on grades and competition, rather than on learning for the love of learning, really really bothered her.

Well, evidently the practice continues and extends to report cards. Current students are being asked to open their report cards in class and calculate their GPA’s. When concern about the privacy implication of this was brought up to the principal by a parent (and shared on a listserv), the response from the administration was as follows:

Thanks for your message about report cards.

I am sorry you have concerns about the process of GPA calculation we have used to help students monitor their progress and set goals. This is a very important learning experience for middle school students, since many of them find planning ahead to be a real challenge. We want to send our students off to high school with a real understanding of what their grades mean, what impact the GPA has on the future, and how their academic habits affect their report cards.

This is why we ask them to look at their report cards and calculate their GPAs as report cards are distributed when their teachers will be talking with them about such topics as trends, using interims to make mid-course adjustments, and, at this time of year especially, how final grades are determined for the transcript - a real incentive in most cases to finish the school year strong.

These calculations are intended to be personal and not a matter of whole-class discussion. Each child has his or her own worksheet and is directed to make his or her own analysis. I know students sometimes show each other their report cards and sometimes ask to see each other’s report cards, but this happens whether or not we are teaching about GPAs, and, of course, students can always say no. I hope if privacy is a particular concern to your child, you will remind her that students are not required to show their report cards to anyone. The sample calculation is based on a hypothetical student with completely made-up grades.

If you feel your child needs a little extra support during this activity, I would be happy to contact her Gold Time teacher, or you could do so directly.

Thanks -

I’m sorry, but this response just took my breath away. “Students can always say no…” “Remind her that students are not required to show their report cards to anyone.” “If your child needs a little extra support.” What planet are these people living on? How is it possible for these “educators” to be so far removed from the social and emotional reality of middle school students, let alone highly gifted middle school students? Because I can just imagine the scene in all its overexcitable, hormonal, competitive, mean girl reality–and it’s not good.

What do you think? Am I off base in thinking that this is repellent rather than educationally sound?

Is this bass-ackward?

[Note: I just found this great article from 2002 entitled "Peer Grading / Peer Pressure by Katherine Bontrager 00-1073 Owasso Indep. School District v. Falvo" which discusses the Supreme Court case on peer gradeing, educational records and FERPA.]

My “Indigo” Children

The other day I was at the library, waiting for C. to make her selections, when I picked up a copy of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Indigo Children.” Thinking it would be a laugh, I tossed it in our book bag.

I first heard the term “indigo child” a few years ago and thought it was pretty woo-woo even then. Children born with blue auras, raised consciousness… part of a generation meant to “usher us into a new world of integrity” (to quote from just one website) . “Cellular memories of Lemuria…” I mean, c’mon. Did people really believe this stuff?

And yet I picked up the book because many of the traits used to define Indigos happen to jibe with exceptional giftedness: Sensitive, intense, determined, strong sense of self, bored easily, creative, love to read. The lists of “famous Indigos” include names like Bill Gates, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Bono, Emily Dickinson, Oprah Winfrey, Walt Disney, Anne Frank, Albert Einstein and many other names one usually associates with extreme intelligence and creativity.

Curious about what it might have to say about parenting these kids, I took book home. The girls were in the room while I was flipping through it and I read aloud the list of Indigo characteristics:

• Your child resists conformity. She doesn’t want to be like any other kid.
• Your child resists authority. Sometimes he can be rebellious.
• Your child responds to discipline better if she is involved in determining the consequences, or if she has been allowed to talk about how she feels about it.
• Your child seems extraordinarily emotionally sensitive. You sometimes wish you could protect him from feeling things so deeply.
• Your child seems highly empathetic. She seems to know what others are feeling without being told.
• Or on the other hand, maybe your child is cold and callous. Sometimes you wonder if he has shut off a part of himself.
• Your child is intuitive. She seems to just know things.
• Your child is wise beyond his years. You sometimes think he has a lot to teach you.
• Your child is physically sensitive or fragile. She has a lot of food allergies, or she seems to respond extraordinarily to sensory input.
• Your child struggles to be patient. Waiting in lines is torture.
• Your child carries himself with a sense that he deserves to be here.
• Your child resists overly structured situations that require little creativity.
• Your child often thinks of better ways of doing things at home or at school.
• Your child doesn’t respond to guilt trips.
• Your child gets bored easily with assigned tasks.
• Your child is wildly creative. Sometimes you wonder what she’ll come up with next….

“Wow!” M. exclaimed. “That’s freaky. Every single one describes me or C.” Then I told them about Lemuria. It became a humorous and non-threatening bonding moment in which we were able they were about to talk about overexcitabilities and some other traits of giftedness. M. brought the conversation up several times that day.

[Aside: Now when I ask in exasperation, "What planet are you from?!" they'll have an answer, lol.]

In all fairness I have to say that amidst all the la la la there actually was actually some sound parenting advice and support in the book. But it was odd to stick a nose over the fence, so to speak, and discover that there is a whole vibrant, thriving…belief system… celebrating and validating kids like mine that I wasn’t previously aware of. Very odd.  I’m rather more used to being part of an invisible and misunderstood minority. One doesn’t find understanding in many places, so in a strange way it sort of makes me feel better knowing that there may be these people out there that “get it.”

But it’s still a lot of hooey.

In a funny coincidence over the weekend I literally became the mother of an Indigo child. Or close enough. M.’s formerly blond hair is now dyed a vivid, deep purple. (That’s her actual hair pictured up above.) Why? Well just as C. was fixated on getting her ears pierced from the age of four, M. has had a fixation on dying her hair. Every Halloween she begged me for that nasty spray-on stuff. Wacky Hair Day during the last week of school was a major event, with M. (and me) coming up with ever more over-the-top creations (complete beach scene on her head anyone?). I looked in local stores for some kind of temporary hair dye, but had no luck finding anything other than boring brown shades.

Then last summer in Santa Fe we stopped in at the oh-so-self-consciously-iconoclastic, wonderfully named Blue Monkey salon and found a whole wall of temporary hair dye in every shocking color imaginable C. chose purple. In the intervening months we’d done a streak of purple a la Susan Sontag a few times, but she wanted to go all the way. So on Saturday we did. The stuff stains anything it touches, making dying her hair rather complex: garbage bag over the shoulders, plastic bags on my hands, silicone brush to work it in, and rinsing in our stainless steel kitchen sink. All that and we still managed to get a spot or two around the house.

However the result is dramatic. Very, very cool. C. looks like a cartoon character. Her hair looks a bit like the snap-on hair of a Polly Pocket. And it really makes her blue eyes pop.

Naturally making her debut with her friends and at school was fun (and made me think of the recent case of the little boy who was kicked out of school for wearing mowhawk). It definitely draws attention–among adults too. One man at the supermarket asked which of her parents has purple hair. An aghast mom at the gym asked my husband how we could let her do that. He shrugged. What is the harm really? It will all wash out in six weeks or so. And by not freaking out we may avoid worse forms of rebellion down the line.