Top Ten Tips

Top Ten Tips to Help Your Child Thrive in School This Year 

-reposted from Challenge Success

1. Ask your child: “How was your day? Learn anything interesting? Get to spend time with friends?” instead of "How did you do on the math test?"

2. Resist the urge to correct the errors in your child's homework. It's your child's work, not yours.

3. Work done with integrity is more important than an A. Pressure to achieve only top scores can make students resort to cheating.

4. Make time for PDF: playtime, downtime, family time. Research shows PDF is critical for overall well-being.

5. Create a technology-free environment during mealtimes. Every adult and child can benefit from a break from constant interruptions and distractions.

6. Collaborate with your child's teachers. Assume best intentions and work together to solve problems.

7. Fight the temptation to bring your child’s forgotten homework to school. Kids gain resilience by learning from small failures.

8. An extra hour of sleep is more valuable than an extra hour of studying. Research shows sleep deprivation can be associated with depression and anxiety.

9. When your child wants to talk with you, stop what you are doing and engage. Does "I hate school" really mean "I am being bullied" or "I don't fit in?"

10. Help your child develop his or her interests and strengths. Discover what your child really loves to do outside of school, not what you think a college admissions officer would like to see on an application.

Parents of Elementary and Middle School students and Homework: What Is Your Role?

Check out this Challenge Success Webinar

Start the second half of the school year off right! Each week we hear from parents around the country that homework is hazardous to their family life. We're here to help. This Friday, January 30th, Dr. Denise Pope will host our first webinar on homework. 

Many parents struggle at least occasionally, and sometimes regularly, with their child over homework. Learn why the dynamics of homework have changed in recent years, what you can do to minimize homework stress, and how to help make homework time more positive for you and your child.

This presentation will provide you with:

• Information on the latest trends and research on homework
• Ideas for how best to support your child’s homework efforts
• Tips for how to communicate and collaborate effectively with teachers about homework

Target Audience: Parents of elementary and middle school students

This is our most requested presentation topic each year. Friday's webinar allows us to share this important content with parents and communities that we can't always reach in person. Get in on our introductory rate of $19/person. Please Note: there is a limit of 100 participants for this webinar. Reserve your ticket now. 
 

Sign-up for the Webinar!
Friday, January 30, 2015
12:30-2:00 pm PST
Introductory Price: $19/person

Denise Pope speaks at Parenting Conference

Denise Pope of Challenge Success will be the keynote speaker at this year's:

San Ramon Valley Council of PTAs      

Parenting 2014 & Beyond...

 Annual Parenting Conference

This year’s keynote speaker, Denise Pope, Ph.D., will talk about "Striving for Balance: Strategies to raise resilient kids in a fast-paced world." 

Denise Pope, Ph.D., is a Senior Lecturer at the Stanford University School of Education. For the past fourteen years, she has specialized in student engagement, curriculum studies, qualitative research methods, and service learning. She is co-founder of Challenge Success, a research and intervention project that provides schools and families the tools they need to raise healthy, motivated students.  She lectures nationally on parenting techniques and pedagogical strategies to increase student well-being, engagement with learning, and integrity.  

After the keynote presentation, participants will have the opportunity to attend their choice of a morning and an afternoon small-group seminar, focusing on a variety of current parenting topics. Detailed descriptions of the seminars are on the registration page and can also be found here.

$45 registration includes the keynote, two seminars, continental breakfast, and lunch. 

I've heard Denise speak many times and highly recommend going to this conference to hear her message.  I've taken her parenting class at Stanford, I believe in Challenge Success and what they promote about reducing student stress and finding family balance.  If you can't attend for the whole day, but can be there for her keynote address, please do so! 

Saturday March 8, 2014 8:30 AM - 2:30 PM PST
Add to Calendar

WhereDougherty Valley High School
10550 Albion Rd
San Ramon, CA 94582

Detailed descriptions of the seminars are on the registration page and can be found here.

Sorry Friedman, YOU Missed the Point

My Op-Ed review of Friedman's Op-Ed

I just read Thomas Friedman's article entitled Obama's Homework Assignment from Sunday's NY Times and didn't agree with most of it.  It may hold some truth in districts where kids are highly underprivileged and parents need to care a bit more about their kid's education, but in middle to upper income school districts I feel that kind of article would exacerbate many of the problems I see here in the Tri-Valley every day.  Friedman's type of logic keeps kids on the Race to Nowhere, spinning their wheels to get into colleges that only a small % will get into anyway, and following traditional definitions of success.  

We have to redefine success.  Friedmann seems to believe success is about high achieving kids, high test scores, and comparing ourselves to other countries - all of which can be accomplished by super-hero teachers and super involved, demanding parents.  Those performance-driven definitions of success lead to many of the problems he speaks of in the first place.  

The irony is that if kids were taught differently (by teachers and parents), where intrinsic motivation, creativity, problem-solving, and cooperation ruled, then all the other stuff would fall into place and test scores and high performance probably WOULD go up.  But demanding more of our already over-scheduled kids, or, expecting all teachers to be uber-incredible, or, yelling at our kids about how much time they spend on screens is not where our energies should lie.  Let's embrace their new tools and interests, let's look at them as people and not just as performers and work together with them (asking their advice) about how to improve education, one small, unique idea at a time.  Teachers and parents should be the supportive Guide on the Side, not the Sage on the Stage, as Alfie Kohn so aptly puts it.

Thanksgiving Tips from Madeline Levine

Taken from: 

Courageous Parenting Blog

by: Madeline Levine, Ph.D.

Challenge Success website

Regaining Gratitude This Thanksgiving

Ever notice how ironic it is that the holiday that’s designed to make us feel serenely grateful for all that we have—our family, our friends, our prosperous life here in the land of turkey and maize and cranberry salad—falls right in the middle of the most hectic, exhausting time of the year?

Think about it. Our kids are burned out from tests and endless pages of homework. One school project follows closely on the heels of another. Sports and other extracurricular events have left all of us exhausted. Meanwhile, Hanukkah and Christmas (with all their economic, social and familial obligations) loom forebodingly on the horizon.

So how can we pause for a day in the midst of all the chaos and stress—not to mention the weird family dynamics that must be navigated over the Thanksgiving table—and just feel thankful?

The complete answer to that question could fill a book! (And if you know a good one, I’d love the name of it!) But because parenting is my area of expertise, I will zero in on our (complicated, stressful, worry-filled) relationship with our children.

Twenty-first century parents fret. It’s what we do. We wring our hands over our kids’ grades, their social development, their performance on the playing field, their future.

Yet it’s been proven again and again that all of our overparenting behaviors—our bribes, our threats, our micromanagement, our insistence that kids do more, better, faster—not only don’t work, they have the opposite effect. Our frantic efforts to give our kids “an edge” are harming rather than helping them.

And so, based on the knowledge that anxiety and gratitude can’t co-exist, let’s all just relax and trust the research. By research I mean the reams of solid scientific evidence that proves backing off a little is the best thing we can do for our kids.

Below are 10 resolutions that I originally wrote for the beginning of the school year. In the spirit of Thanksgiving I have repurposed them here. I think they speak to the mindset that keeps us from living in the moment and truly savoring the all-too-short time we really have with our kids.

Ten Resolutions For Becoming a More Grateful Parent:

1. I will make sure my child gets a full night’s sleep. Kids need between nine and 12 hours a night. Sleep deprivation impairs concentration, memory, and the ability to accurately read emotional cues. It makes kids crabby and compromises their ability to learn.

2. I will remember that I am a parent, not a CEO. Results are down the line, not at the end of the quarter. This means the occasional “B” or “C” will not break your child’s future prospects. Stop catastrophizing. You won’t see the final fruits of your parenting until your child is grown and gone.

3. I will remember the success trajectory is a squiggle ... not a straight line. Few of us become successful by simply putting one foot in front of the other. Most of us encounter a multitude of twists, turns, direction changes, and stops on the way to our goals.

4. I will love the child in front of me. Appreciate and be thankful for your child’s unique gifts. Children are talented in a multitude of different ways. See your child’s particular talents clearly.

5. I will not push my child to be perfect. Besides genetics, perfectionism is the strongest predictor of clinical depression. Life is full of mistakes, imperfect days, and human failings. Kids need to learn how to cope with these inevitabilities. They (and you) need to be able to feel happiness and gratitude in the face of imperfection.

6. I will not do for my child what he can do for himself. This kills motivation and the ability to innovate. Both are missing from too many young people in today’s workforce.

7. I will not do for my child what she can almost do for herself. At one time your child could almost walk. Now she can walk. Enough said.

8. I will not confuse my needs with my child’s needs. This is the most toxic manifestation of overparenting. Get a hobby or a therapist instead.

9. I will honor the importance of PDF (Play Time, Down Time and Family Time). Don’t overschedule. Kids need time to play, daydream, and just hang out. It’s in these precious “between” times that crucial developmental tasks are accomplished.

10. I will value my own (adult) life. Being a happy, fulfilled, and yes, grateful adult makes you a better parent. It’s one of the best gifts you can give your child. It makes adulthood look like something worth striving for.

When we observe Thanksgiving the way I believe we’re meant to, we realize that life is truly rich and bountiful. As parents, we’ve been given life’s greatest gift. Learning to appreciate and honor that gift may mean breaking the culturally sanctioned patterns that cause us to unknowingly damage our kids even as we seek to make life better for them.

Overparenting is about anxiously exerting control. Gratitude is about accepting what we’ve been given and noticing the joy that it brings. This Thanksgiving weekend, let’s try to do less of the former and more of the latter. And from here out, let’s try to guide and teach our kids without seeking to force them into the mold that we (and society) believe they should conform to. When you can master that balance you will become a perpetually grateful parent.

6 Things That Matter More Than Grades

I'm re-posting Madeline Levine's blog post from the Challenge Success website below. In a nutshell, she writes that the following six things are more important than perfect grades:


• Having Friends – one of the best predictors of mental health. Kids who are too preoccupied with grades and put all their energy into studying don’t have the necessary time to cultivate strong relationships. Other people tend to be seen as ways to gain an advantage rather than as potential sources of mutual support. Sometimes parents say, “They can make friends later.” No they can’t. Being a good friend takes a great deal of practice beginning early in life.

• Character – integrity, honesty, reliability. These are the kinds of traits that we look for in friends, spouses and workers. This country has seen enough despair brought on by people who lack a basic sense of decency and responsibility to others.

• Resilience – Try to make it through life without a good set of coping skills. Impossible. Life throws lots of curve balls at us and will at our children. Learning how to manage: how to delay gratification, to exert self-control, to soothe one’s self, to fall down and get up again – are mandatory so that our children are not undone when faced with challenge. And they will be faced with challenge.

• Interests/Passions – I’m tentative about using the word “passion,” hence the interests/passions qualifier. I’ve had moms call me worried that their four-year-old child doesn’t have a “passion.” Life is their passion. Depending on temperament, for many kids, interest is enough. But Chloe is right when she says she isn’t really “learning anything.” Real interests and passions grow out of talent, time and practice. They make life rich.

• Collaboration – Every C-level executive I’ve spoken with underscores the need for collaboration in the workplace. In our “flat” world, problems are so complex, that they will not be solved by individuals sitting in a room and being hit by a bolt of lightening. People working together, often across cultures and time zones will solve them. And of course, we all know the benefit of having a collaborative spouse or best friend.

• Self-Reflection – Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Whether you’re a fan of psychology or not, having the time and inclination to understand one’s self is critical to making good decisions, to understanding motives and to appreciating the challenges that living presents. Kids who are busy “climbing the ladder” from early on will often say they don’t have time to “think about things.” Big mistake. Without thinking about things, one is likely to repeat mistakes and feel “lost.” A sense of self comes from many places, but can’t be constructed without time devoted to self-reflection.


I agree with Madeline Levine. Read the whole post here.

Your thoughts?

Parenting Tips to Start the School Year off Right

These strategies are from the Challenge Success website.

To see the link click here.

• Define success on your terms. 
  Take time to consider the qualities you hope your children have when they leave the nest. How you define success is analogous to your mission statement as a parent. Without considering this explicitly, many families unwittingly default to the prevailing, narrow notion of success. Resist parent peer pressure, be informed and trust your gut.
• Maintain play time, down time, and family time. Avoid over-scheduling. 
  Young children need ample time for their most important job: unstructured play. Kids of all ages need restorative time to reflect and dream. And families need time together: at meals, on weekends, and during vacations to connect and form lasting bonds.
• Love your children unconditionally. 
  The basis for healthy emotional development is a sense of being lovable. Make sure your children know that they are loved for who they are, not only for how well they perform. Value the uniqueness of each child.
• Discipline and set limits. 
  There are two sides to parenting: warmth and discipline. Warmth is easier, but discipline is equally important. Children feel secure and cared for when their parents are willing to set limits. This is how children learn important skills like self-control and frustration tolerance. Don't worry about your child's temporary anger or indignation when you set limits. It will pass.
• Allow kids space to develop on their own and make mistakes. 
  Kids today experience unprecedented levels of adult direction and intervention. Whenever possible, let kids play and work on their own. Encourage appropriate risk-taking and allow kids to make mistakes--and learn from them. Self-direction and risk-taking breed resilience, creative thinking, and long-term success.
• Build responsibility at home and in the community. 
  Have children help in age-appropriate ways with chores around the house. This requires you to take time to show children how to do the chores and to allow tasks to get done differently (and sometimes not as well) as if you did them yourself. It also reminds children that they are a contributing, capable part of a family team, not an entitled member served by parents. As they get older, encourage children to be active participants in their community, and set an example by being involved yourself.
• Unplug. 
  Set limits on the amount of time your children watch TV, play screen-based games, instant message, and use the computer recreationally. For young children, less than an hour or so per day is a good starting point. Older kids also need limits on their screen time and the content they watch. All screen time is not equal, and you need to be aware of what your child is watching and with whom they are communicating. Children need ample time to interact with real people, without technology, and to be in the natural world.
• Ease performance pressure. 
  For many young people, the questions parents ask most often are: "How did you do on the test? Have you done your homework?" The subtle message to kids is that performance and results matter most. Instead, emphasize the importance of effort, hard work, resilience, and intellectual curiosity by asking open-ended, non-judgmental questions such as, "How did the day go?"
• Debunk college myths. 
  Make sure your children understand that there are many different paths to success after high school. There are many, many excellent colleges, all with different attributes and personalities; none right for everyone. Help your child find the "right fit." Some students may fare better attending a junior college or other post-secondary option (such as gap year, travel programs, or trade schools).

BEYOND A WAITRESS

by Shoshana Wineburg

Five months ago, I started working nights at a restaurant. Though the restaurant is cozy and well-attended, I noticed something peculiar: many diners were not communicating with each other. They were distracted by their screens. Disturbed, I wrote an op-ed and published it in The Seattle Times. At the end of the article, I included this short bio:

"Shoshana Wineburg graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a degree in American Studies. She waits tables in Seattle."

Comments ensued. Most people responded to the article's content; others could care less. They wanted to talk about my degree. One user wrote that my bio was "the saddest part of the article." Someone else said my degree was not "worthwhile," and that waiting tables after graduating from Stanford was "kinda depressing."

I haven't just waited tables after Stanford. I've done other things. But that's beside the point. The point is that the comments represent a value system that measures success by achievement and income, not character. This is a type of success our culture breeds, a type of success that pervades our high schools and college campuses. We strive for status. We are defined by our name-brands. We are measured by our income.

I know this value system because I encountered it at Stanford. I know it intimately because I subscribed to it.

Like many other students, once I got to campus, I started looking forward. I made a post-college five-year plan. I had it all figured out.

Until I didn't.

The problem was that as I equated my self-worth with my achievement, I got sick. It started as stress. Then it mushroomed into crippling anxiety. I spent days with a tightened chest and knotted stomach. The anxiety festered. By winter quarter junior year, I was miserable. I walked around campus with a plastered smile and glassy eyes exhausted from holding back tears. I slid into depression. Negative voices suffocated me. Writing my essays took forever. I imagined getting D's. You're worthless, the voices whispered. You're a fraud.

The following quarter was my quarter abroad. I was supposed to go to France. I convinced myself that the Eifel Tower would solve my problems. Who gets depressed in Paris? How could chocolate croissants not make me happy?

I got worse. I lost my concentration. I couldn't read because I couldn't register the words. I struggled to speak. Sentences came out disjointed, thoughts incoherent. I had sleepless nights and my eyes started twitching. I would walk around with my hand clasped to my chest, because the pain throbbed. Complex thoughts shriveled to simple ones. Could I get through the day? How much more could I tolerate? How much longer could I last?

I never got to enjoy the croissant because food lost its taste. I stopped eating. I stopped talking. I stopped living.

Had I not had a best friend with me, I don't know what would have happened. Her presence was my blessing. It was she who convinced me to go home. She told me that I had been strong, but the real strength would be to admit that I needed help.

So I did the unthinkable for someone who had been hard-wired to succeed. I dropped out of Stanford-in Paris. I failed.

Here's what failure teaches you. Failure teaches you humility. Failure teaches you are more than your shortcomings; your humanity extends beyond the W's on your transcript. Failure teaches you gratitude. It forces you to reexamine what's important and appreciate all you have. Failure is impermanent. You get through it. Along the way, you cultivate perspective. And empathy. And compassion. You learn that despite the fall, you'll be okay.

When I got back to school, I promised myself that I would live with integrity. I dropped the honors and the double major. I spent my senior year taking classes that resonated with me. I took meaningful classes, classes that forced me to think critically, ethically, and philosophically.

Failure gave me the courage to pursue different paths and paradigms of success. After graduating, I spent time at a religious institute in Jerusalem. I worked with an NGO doing community empowerment with Israel's Ethiopian Community. I lived on a mountain in Peru and taught English in the Andes.

Now, I've returned to the US. And, yes, at night, I work in a restaurant. It's good money and it pays my bills. It's not permanent. I don't aspire to serve food my whole life. But for now, it's what I'm doing.

We all want to find stable and satisfying employment. But ultimately who we are—how we think, how we communicate, how we empathize, how we love—is just as much a part of success as achievement. Too often we value the latter at the expense of the former. Too often, that recipe makes us sick.

I won't be made sick. Not again.

Shoshana Wineburg grew up in Seattle, Washington. She graduated from Stanford in 2009 with a degree in American Studies. Following graduation, she lived in Israel and Peru and waited tables in between. She currently works at a restaurant in Seattle.

Source: Challenge Success website

Race to Nowhere coming to Pleasanton

In case you haven't had a chance to see Race to Nowhere, you will have an opportunity November 15, 2012 in Pleasanton. The Amador Valley High School (AVHS) PTSA Wellness Committee and the AVHS Challenge Success Team are hosting a Race to Nowhere screening at Valley Community Church (4455 Del Valle Parkway, Pleasanton) on November 15th at 6:30pm. This event is open to the community.

Race toNowhere is an award-winning documentary that highlights the unintended consequences of our pressure-cooker culture and education system. An eye-opening call to action, the film challenges our current assumptions about how to best prepare young people for the future.

Immediately following the screening of Race to Nowhere, a student moderated panel discussion of the issues raised in this documentary will be . Learn, ask and hear from our panelist:

·       Amador Valley High School's Administrators

·       Amador Valley High School’s Challenge Success Students

·       Members of the Pleasanton Unified School District

·       City of Pleasanton Student & Family Resources

·       Local Professional Resources

·       And other representatives from organizations that are connected to our students

Invite friends, family members, colleagues, and individuals that would benefit from this eye-opening experience! Reserve your space now by visiting this link. 

I'm an advisor to this film and highly recommend it.  It will open your eyes and hopefully inspire some personal and possibly even professional change in your life and community. 

In Favor of a Gap Year

I'm posting an article here that I found on the Challenge Success website written by a high school student. Leave a comment at the end of the post if you have a minute...

Reinvention
by Alex McNeil

Decked out in robes and hats, my 200-something graduating classmates were arranged in rows on the lawn below the stage. Beyond them their family and friends sat waiting for the joint speech that was to be delivered by the salutatorian and me.

It was not to be delivered by the salutatorian and me because I was the valedictorian. I was not. My GPA put me soundly in the lower-most quartile of my graduating class, and it was only a coincidence that my best friend—Andrew—was the salutatorian. We were speaking together because we wanted to and because my school didn’t care about grades when it came to graduation speeches. Anyone who cared to perform was welcome to audition—academic standings be damned.

Our speech was probably as unmemorable as your average student-delivered graduations speech: full of stammers and stutters, creatively bankrupt. But I remember it clearly for two reasons. One, I gave it (and I was nervous as hell). Two, I didn’t think I really deserved to speak at all.

The way I saw it, I didn’t belong behind the podium because I did terribly in high school. I never understood why I was in school, nor for whom I was there, and it reflected in my transcript. By senior year I found myself with a 2.4 GPA and no college acceptances. But there I was, speaking to my peers like I knew what I was doing. I felt like I was saying “I will strike out on the path that lies before me with cool, excited confidence. You should, too.”

I was neither cool nor confident—I was college-less and confused.

School had been hard for me, and I wasn’t eager to jump into another four years of it. But the idea of college was tempting. Maybe I would be good at it, I thought. Maybe it would just magically click. Maybe.

But wistful thinking couldn’t erase bad grades. So, not really knowing what else to do, I came up with a plan. It went something like this: take a gap year; attend a junior college; do well; transfer to a good school. I figured that a break from school might be what I needed. After all, I had no idea what I was genuinely passionate about or what I was interested in doing with the rest of my life.

This was a decent plan. But I was still embarrassed that it was the only plan available. Insecure, I did everything I could to hide my GPA from my friends. I lied, omitted truths, and built up a well-articulated fortress of reasons as to why I wouldn’t be attending a four-year college in the fall. I downplayed my academic track record and focused instead on money: “Honestly, it’s economical to go to community college. I don’t want to pay tuition for my GEs! I could go to a community college and get the same education for a fraction of the cost.” It wasn’t the worst argument, but it wasn’t one I wanted to be making. The contrarian in me doesn’t like to admit it, but I just wanted what everyone else did—a little liberal arts college to call my own.

But, thanks to my ridiculously low GPA, that wasn’t an option for me. My application was too weak to get me into the schools where I wanted to be, and I had no desire to attend the schools that would have accepted me.

Summer vacation came and went. My friends went off to school, and I found myself stumbling headfirst onto an India-bound plane and into the unknown. My gap year had begun.

My trip to India was steeped in new experiences—filled with revelatory moments of both joy and disgust. I saw the nauseating wealth of Mumbai’s upper class, experienced the destitution that slept in the louse-ridden corridors of an Indian orphanage, and got rocked by a magnitude-6.9 earthquake. During a two-week stint in Nepal I met the founder of a non-profit school-building initiative.

The prospect of building a school in a country as beautiful as Nepal was too much to pass up. I asked if I could come build with him. He said yes. I joined him two months later.

I left high school as a set of numbers: my GPA, my class rank, my SAT score. I returned from my gap year as more than that. I returned as a person.

My gap year rebuilt my sense of self-worth. By the end of it—for the first time in my life—I felt comfortable and happy in my own skin. I’m attending a community college now, but I’m doing it with purpose, direction, and confidence. My gap year showed me that I am lucky to have been born in a country where education is compulsory, of high quality, and free. My gap year convinced me that it is not just my duty, but also my privilege to spend my life helping those less fortunate than I am.

Everyone should take a gap year at some point in their life—student or otherwise. It gave me time to figure out who I am, who I am not, and who I want to be. My gap year was a year of introspection and self-exploration—one that changed the trajectory of my entire life.

In retrospect, I’m glad I failed high school. I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I hadn’t.

-Alex McNeil is an intern for Challenge Success

5-Week Parent Ed Course

In October, Challenge Success is offering a 5-Week parent education course called, "Raising Well-Balanced Children in a Fast-Paced World" in two locations in the Bay Area: Corte Madera and Walnut Creek.  You can register for either course here.

I took this course in Palo Alto a couple of years ago, and highly recommend it.  It will be a nice follow up to Madeline Levine's lecture at San Ramon Valley High School on October 2.

Free Challenge Success Event

You and your entire community are invited to attend the 

Challenge Success Free Parent Education Session. 

The Knowledge to Navigate: Strategies for Raising Healthy & Motivated Kids

September 28, 2012, from 7:00pm-9:00pm

Memorial Auditorium, Stanford University

Our Keynote, Michael Riera, Ph.D. joins our Co-Founders, Stanford Senior Lecturer, Denise Pope, Ph.D. and New York Times Bestselling Author, Madeline Levine, Ph.D. for an interactive discussion about long-lasting success and how families and educators can help kids become meaningful contributors for the 21st century.

This event is hosted by Challenge Success. Please visit, www.challengesuccess.org to register and contact aalamar@stanford.edu more information.

This event is THIS FRIDAY, September 28th!

I have attended this free event several times, and strongly encourage you to attend.  I'd like to see Challenge Success teams begin in many of our Tri Valley high schools.  Challenge Success is a nice follow up to the film Race to Nowhere and all of the issues that are raised in the film that we need to continuously be working on - student stress, over achievers, resume building from an early age, college requirements, homework overload, lack of sleep, lack of balance, teen suicide, etc.

Dr. Madeline Levine Event

 

and

Present
A Community Education Event ...

Parenting for Authentic Success

An evening with Dr. Madeline Levine 

best selling author of The Price of Privilege and Teach Your Children Well

_____________________________________________

Tuesday, October 2nd at 7:00pm

San Ramon Valley High School - P.A.C.

(Book Signing at the Event)

ADMISSION: $10 Pre-Registration On-Line or $15 at the Door

Middle School and High School Students – FREE

Seating is LIMITED ~ Pre-registration is RECOMMENDED!!!

Register for this Event Here

__________________________________________________________________

“Teach Your Children Well: Parenting for Authentic Success”acknowledges that every parent wants successful children, but emphasizes that until we are clearer about our core values and the

parenting choices that are most likely to lead to authentic success, we will continue to

raise exhausted, externally-driven, impaired children who believe that they are “only as

good as their last performance.” Real success is always an “inside job”, argues Levine,

and is measured not by today’s report card but by the people our children become ten to

fifteen years down the line.

Childcare Provided for Ages 3 yrs to Kindergarten

No children under 3 years old!!

REGISTRATION FOR CHILDCARE is REQUIRED!!!

Register My Kids for Childcare at this event here!

Why a Blog about Homework?

Homework is a hot button topic. Anyone who has ever been a student, is currently a student or who is the parent of a student has an opinion about homework. Today when I Google “homework ” I find 40,100,000 results. Many of these homework sites offer tips to help children with their homework and accept the status quo – that homework has been a part of the American public school tradition since the early 1900s and will remain a big part of our education system for many years to come.

I hope not.

But I didn’t always feel this way. I’m trained as a middle and high school teacher of English, history, and reading. During my teacher training, I accepted and believed in the validity of homework. After all, I went through school, did some homework, became a teacher and turned out fine, so homework must have helped me achieve those goals, right?

But I didn’t have a lot of homework as a child, and I didn’t mind doing the homework I did have. It wasn’t until I had my own children that I really began to question the value of homework. But, sadly, that didn’t happen until they were in the 6^th and 8^th grades. Why did it take me so long to really examine their homework and question its importance?

It took me so long because I believed everything I was told about homework. “It reinforces learning. It teaches discipline and responsibility. It prepares students for class…”

But what happens when it doesn’t do those things? What happens when I did everything I was told to do by the school – set up a regular homework routine, gave my children a healthy snack before they start their homework, provide a quiet, well-lit place for them to do their homework – yet they still struggled with it?

What happens when we explored more avenues of homework help for one of our boys in particular (multiple tutors, special education resources, psychological testing, medication) and he still struggled with homework?

At some point, I finally stopped blaming my child for his homework limitations and started blaming everything else around him. I blamed the school, I blamed the teachers, I blamed the administration, I blamed the system, I blamed myself, I blamed my parenting, I blamed it on his ADHD. But when the blaming didn’t change the fact that he still struggled with homework, and still had hours and hours of it, I finally changed my attitude about it.

All this homework turmoil was a blessing in disguise.

One day I finally started really looking at the homework he was being asked to do. I read “The Homework Myth” by Alfie Kohn and I had a revelation about homework. I agreed with almost everything Kohn wrote in that book, and felt a huge sense of relief that I wasn’t the only educated person out there who disagreed with the idea of homework and hated what it did to our family evenings, weekends and holidays. “Most kids hate homework. They dread it, groan about it, put off doing it as long as possible. It may be the single most reliable extinguisher of the flame of curiosity.” (17)

I found Sara Bennett’s website www.StopHomework.com and that became an excellent daily resource for me and helped me see that there were many more educated people all over the US who disagreed with the idea of homework. I also read her book, “The Case Against Homework,” and got many good ideas from it. I read countless Internet articles and more books on homework. I talked to and emailed people about homework. I learned about Challenge Success, Denise Pope’s program at Stanford. I started learning about many other pro-child programs that shared my views of homework. See the sidebar “Recommended Blogs & Websites”

I enlisted the help of a friend, Julie, who shared my feelings about education and homework. We got a small group of parents together to talk about homework. We found that as soon as we starting discussing homework as a group, the talk quickly morphed into discussions of parenting, education, standardized testing, ADHD, teacher-training, college admissions, curriculum development, student stress, AP classes, childhood obesity, mental health issues, competitive sports, tutors, over-scheduled lives, finding balance, etc. We concluded that there were many problems surrounding homework and no simple solutions, yet we wanted to do something about it.

We took an informal email survey about homework from other parents in our district and got 100 responses that we collected in a spreadsheet. We brought that along with many articles and books on homework to a meeting we had with our school district’s curriculum instruction director. A week after that, the district (which serves over 27,000 students) formed a homework task force to rewrite the outdated policy. I was fortunate enough to be on the taskforce as a parent representative. The taskforce had 19 total participants – a combination of parents, teachers and administrators.

We rewrote the policy in under a year. It was a difficult process where 19 opinionated individuals had to agree on something cohesive to be presented to the Board of Education. I personally enlisted Sara Bennett's help during this process. While I think the new policy is better policy than the original one, I think it still has a long way to go to being a really great, “outside of the box,” forward-thinking homework policy. To read the policy, go here.

For example, I would have liked to include an “opt-out” provision where parents could sign a statement saying they are opting out of having their child do homework with no negative consequences to the child. I would have liked to see a statement included about the fact that any homework assigned would not be graded. I would have liked to see shorter time limit guidelines on homework. I would have liked to see that homework would be the exception and not the rule. I would have liked it to be more similar to Toronto’s homework policy. You can read that here.

Even if I didn’t get exactly what I wanted in the homework policy, being on that taskforce was a good experience for me and has led to other projects I’m working on now. See the film “Race to Nowhere.” The experience also helped me formulate more conclusions about homework. One of those is that homework is not the cause of, but rather a symptom of many problems in education.

Teachers often give homework because they say they don’t have enough time to complete everything during class time. If we changed the mindset from believing that we need to teach a set amount of information in a limited time, to focusing on individual needs and learning goals of each student, we would approach education differently.

Without pressures from above to fulfill state mandates and without pressures from administration to teach to a test, teachers would ideally be free to collectively and creatively decide how students learn best. This is no simple task, however, and it involves a shift in thinking about the principles of education that will then naturally lead to a change in practices of education. See my sidebar for my favorite books on education. And, another great resource I just linked to is this "Too Much Homework" page.

The good news is that there are great teachers and schools doing this, successfully every day. See my sidebar “Noteworthy Schools/Programs.” Even a big, public school can learn from these smaller schools and teachers that have discovered how kids learn best. Learning is an organic process, not a linear one. We can’t fill up a kid’s head with knowledge, have him do his homework, take some tests, graduate and call it success.

We have to figure out what turns kids on to learning and how they learn before we can help them learn. In our new technological age of constant information, we have to shift from memorizing and regurgitating facts in school to making sense of all these readily-available facts by analyzing, synthesizing, creating, innovating and problem-solving. We have to move from teacher as expert, to teacher as facilitator. We need more student choice and voice. We also have to redefine success in this culture.

The truth is, I don’t actually mind if my kids have homework, AS LONG AS IT TURNS THEM ON TO LEARNING, and as long as it isn't just a spewing out of facts, and as long as it doesn’t consume their whole evening, weekend or holiday. But what I've observed over the last ten years is that their homework usually does TURN THEM OFF to the subject and it's usually a teacher-created exercise focusing on how well they follow directions rather than on how they synthesize and use information. I've only seen a few really inspired assignments through the years.

Sadly, what usually happens is this type of scenario: After doing a time-consuming English project last June, my older son said, “I’m so glad that’s done because now I don’t have to read another book until next year when school starts.” That was a perfect example of a homework assignment that killed the joy of learning (and reading!).

I hear comments like this from my kids much more often than I hear comments about how excited they are about what they are learning in school. The things that excite them in school are their friends, the extra-curriculars, and the precious few days without homework.

As I sit here typing, my son (who is doing his homework) just said "I hate school. But school wouldn't be that bad if we didn't have homework. Why do we have homework on the weekends?"

I rest my case.

Challenge Success Conference - Sept 25, 09

Check out the Challenge Success Website (http://www.challengesuccess.org/)

Our children live in a high-stakes, high-pressure world.

Today, a young person's success is too often measured by easily-observed symbols: trophies, grades, test scores, and acceptance into prestigious schools. Expectations once reserved for a small group of exceptional students are now expected of many.

Our children are experiencing unacceptably high levels of anxiety disorders, depression, substance abuse, suicide, poor physical health, and disengagement from learning. Unrealistic achievement pressure contributes to these problems.

Our children are not prepared for the challenges of the 21st century.

Educators, mental health professionals, and business leaders agree that the pursuit of a narrow vision of success often leaves young people lacking the skills most needed to thrive in a rapidly changing world--adaptability, interpersonal and collaborative skills, and the ingenuity and creativity to solve complex problems.

About Our Conferences

Challenge Success offers dynamic conferences for schools, parents, and youth to come together to address issues of student health, school engagement, and academic integrity. All conferences take place at Stanford University, where school teams comprised of principals, teachers, parents, counselors, students, and other community members work together to create site-specific plans for school reform.

Our Challenge Success Annual Fall Conference takes place in September and includes a Friday night plenary session that is free and open to the public. Keynote speakers are experts in child development, medicine, psychology, public health, college admissions, and/or education. These experts are joined by a panel of student speakers who offer personal viewpoints on academic stress and coping strategies.

Challenge Success/SOS Conference:

Our Fall 2009 Conference will take place on September 25-26, 2009.

Fall Plenary Session Free and Open to the Public

Friday September 25, 2009

Memorial Auditorium, Stanford University, 7:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Introduction:

Denise Pope, Ph.D., Co-founder, Challenge Success/SOS, Stanford University School of Education Senior Lecturer, and author of “Doing School": How we are creating a generation of stressed-out, materialistic, and miseducated students. http://www.amazon.com/Doing-School-Stressed-Out-Materialistic-Miseducated/dp/0300098332/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252434758&sr=1-1

Keynote Speakers:

Michael Thompson, Ph.D. is a consultant, author and psychologist specializing in children and families. He is the clinical consultant to The Belmont Hill School and has worked in more than five hundred schools across the United States, as well as in international schools in Central America, Europe and Asia. He and his co-author, Dan Kindlon, wrote the New York Times best-selling book, Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys (Ballantine Books,1999). In addition, Dr. Thompson is the author of several other acclaimed books, including Best Friends/Worst Enemies: Understanding the Social Worlds of Children(Ballantine, 2001) and The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Achieve Success in School and in Life (with Teresa Barker, Ballantine, 2004).

Chris Kelly is the Chief Privacy Officer and Head of Global Public Policy at Facebook, guiding Facebook’s efforts to make the Internet a safer and more trusted place. He has previously served as Chief Privacy Officer at three other Internet companies, Spoke Software, Excite@Home, and Kendara, and was an attorney in private practice at Baker & McKenzie and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich and Rosati. Chris also served as a policy advisor in the Clinton Administration. He was Editor in Chief of the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology and part of the founding team for the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

Panelists:

Madeline Levine, Ph.D., Co-founder, Challenge Success/SOS, and clinical psychologist and best-selling author of The Price of Privilege.

Three Students will offer their perspectives on primary stressors and coping strategies in middle school and high school.

To RSVP for the Friday night session, go to:

http://www.challengesuccess.org/Events/Conferences/Fall/PlenarySessionRSVP/tabid/1016/Default.aspx