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Strollerderby
I was amused when my 7th grade biology teacher insisted that it was impossible for two blue or green eyed parents like mine to produce brown-eyed children like me and my brother.
“You should talk to your parents about this,” said the teacher, looking more than a bit concerned that he had just revealed a family secret.
The truth is that it was my idea of a practical joke. My parents had already told my brother and me that we had been adopted as babies.
When it came time to create a family tree, I researched the ancestors of the only family I knew and ignored my biological origins. I don’t remember being troubled by the assignment at all, but I can see how others in the same situation might feel uncomfortable.
In yesterday’s “Motherlode” column in The New York Times, Lisa Belkin addresses the issue of how teachers assign family trees and other biology-related projects to students who may not know their biological roots.
It’s not just adoptees who might have a problem with genetics assignments. What about all of the kids who are part of non-traditional families? Once you include gay parents, blended families, and families formed by sperm or egg donation or surrogate parents, that’s a significant group.
Belkin’s column features David Smith, an adoptive parent and science teacher, hated to see his 4th grade daughter, who was adopted, to feel left out because of a homework assignment. Smith suggests a solution to the problem:
Teachers should teach population biology (there’s a great collaborative activity at k12science.org, for example) instead of pedigree genetics. Kids still learn that offspring resemble their biological parent, but they also learn that not all dominant traits are common.
Adoptive Families magazine also provides a 1-page handout for teachers to educate them about adoption and ways they can incorporate the it into the classroom.
The family tree project is instructive, but there are other ways to convey the same information. There is no reason an assignment should exclude a segment of the student population.
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Census forms started arriving last week, and they’re remarkably simple — just a few basic facts about every person living in the household.
But what if a member of the family doesn’t live in the household? Lisa Belkin at Motherlode has a freshman in college. When it came time to fill out her census form, her heart hurt a little when she realized she wouldn’t be counting her oldest child. Belkin writes:
I don’t wish to blame the victim here, but we mothers — especially the new ones — can sure be hard on our friends. And not just the childless ones. Judging from two guest posts over at the Motherlode, even other mothers are no fun to be around.
Sasha Brown-Worsham, a writer in Boston, broke up with her childless friend. Granted, said friend offered to pop in a DVD to shut her blob of a baby up and also mentioned relief that she didn’t have the author’s daughter’s “wild mane of hair” to comb. What mother wouldn’t be miffed? Continue reading »
As parents in the information age, we have lots of tools at our disposal when it comes to doing what’s best for our kids. Before they are even born, we surf baby name sites to find one that will ensure they stand out but not too far out. We go online to research the best cribs and car seats before we choose one. And we are alerted instantly when they are recalled. We read what the experts and other parents think about the educational value of the books, toys and games we are considering purchasing for our kids.
Going online for parenting information has become so automatic that it’s no surprise that the first thing many of us do when our child shows symptoms of an illness is to turn to Dr. Google. But as Jennifer Gruden writes in an article titled “Anxiety in the Age of Google,” that is where information and insanity often meet. Continue reading »
It was about a year ago, playing with my then three-year-old daughter at a Mommy and Me-style preschool class, that I realized she was not wearing any underwear under her dress.
“Where are your underwear?” I hissed in her ear, regretting my decision to let her get herself dressed that morning.
“I don’t like dem,” she said nonchalantly.
I spent the next hour certain she was going to lift her dress and flash the entire class during circle time. She didn’t. But what came after was a month long phase where I insisted she wear underwear and she did everything she could to try to get around that rule.
“We wear underwear every day!” I’d sing, something I never thought I’d have to say, let alone teach.
Forget about kids saying the darndest things, it’s parents who often find themselves surprised by the words that leave their mouths.
Last week on Babble, Shannon Rassmussen told us how to get and keep a quality babysitter. But what happens if the person you’ve already hired turns out not to be the person you thought they were?
Over at Motherlode, an anonymous mom tells her story: Her beloved nanny, described as a selfless young woman who is unusually skilled with children, is suspected of feeding the kids — one three, the other 16 months — Benadryl every day at nap time. The nanny has been fired, but the mom wonders if she’s got a responsibility to the nanny’s next family:
When my daughter informed she would be not be homeschooling after all, one of the many little sighs of relief I exhaled was that I wouldn’t have to teach her algebra, or even addition.
As a bright kid, I was always “gifted” at math, but that didn’t mean I liked it. By the time I hit high school, I’d gotten the message that being good with numbers wasn’t cool for a girl, so I shirked it. When it came time to go to college, I chose a school that did not require any math classes.
Now my stepson is 15, and I can’t even read his math homework, let alone help him solve it.
Happily, I saved my kids from a lifetime of math cluelessness by marrying a professional nerd who teaches math and physics at a university. In our house, he is the math department.
When Lisa Belkin broached this topic over on Motherlode, commenters pointed out the gender disparity between men and women around math. Lisa’s family, like mine, is headed by a math averse mom and a math friendly dad.
I’m trying to do more math for the girls’ sake. I want my girls to grow up knowing women can do just as much math as men. But let’s be real: I can pull this off now because the oldest one is 5. She is hard at work learning to count to 100. When she starts bringing home differential equations, she is going straight to Daddy.
Two recent studies show that most American parents are a lot like me when it comes to math homework: clueless and uncomfortable. One commissioned by Intel shows that parents feel more equipped to talk about sex and drugs with their kids than math and science. Another, by Sylvan Learning, found that more than 6 out of 10 parents are not confident that they can solve their kids’ math homework in middle and high school.
Those jitters about math homework translate to kids, who start to feel nervous about the subject themselves. Math is increasingly important for higher education and professional fields, but most adults rate it as the most challenging subject taught in school.
For good reason. Less than 40% of eight and fourth graders are “proficient” or better at grade-level math skills. Clearly our kids could use some help with their math homework.
Do you help your kids with their homework? Does the thought of having to go through high school algebra again give you the shivers? If we can’t help our kids learn math, who can?
Photo: tracy_the_astonishing
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