Expensive dates

cellphone contracts, opt-in testing, a wonderful movie, a poem

Eons, perhaps five years, ago I promised that children would get cellphones on their 13th birthday. Like Carabosse wielding the spindle, the teen years couldn’t have sounded further away at the time. And that date aligned with the work of Wait Until 8th, a website that offers a myriad of advice for handling cellphones in the home. They connect families within schools to try to parent-pressure other parents into waiting until 8th grade. Pretty cool work; this podcast gives an excellent summary.

Anyway as the promised date crept closer, I began to wish I had said 14. Or 15. Or 16. But my husband and I realized that setting family boundaries around how the cellphone was used was going to need to happen no matter how long we held out. And just because social media apps had attacked an entire generation unawares didn’t mean the technology had to be tossed out as well. And of course, I recognized the enormous convenience of arming my active, helpful preteen with a way to communicate (if you haven’t texted a child over the age of ten, you have a lot of delightful emojis to look forward to). Here I will mention flip phones because I am aware of these as option that many families settle on, but it wasn’t for us. The kids are allowed to have their own Apple accounts on ipads when they are 10, so it felt odd to wait until 13 and then move backward in technology. And in general we’re just a merry Apple-exploring family.

Here are a few of the guidelines we put into our cellphone contract…

   Cell phone goes to sleep at 9pm every night in the kitchen. 

  Not to be used at the table when eating, on car rides shorter than 30 minutes and anytime you are asked to put it away for the good of the family. 

If you are doing homework or reading a book, put the phone in another room, preferably in a drawer.

    Your parents will review your text messages at any time, you are welcome to use that an excuse to exit any conversation with which you are uncomfortable. 

No mindless games. Learning games welcome. 

   No social media. 

   Anything you write on the internet can be read by anyone. 

What does she do with it? Same things as me mostly. Texts friends. Reads emails and recaps them to me before I get to them. Plays crossword puzzles. Does Seterra geography quizzes. Tells us when to come get her. Last night she facetimed her sisters from a vacation with her grandparents, and shared her screen so she could walk them through all her photos of the trip so far. There’s a way in which I wouldn’t have even known she was interested in doing that, had she not had the technology to do it…

🌿 Growing up has all sorts of milestones, and observing them pass often inspires a feeling of pride in me. That’s how I’m feeling about this milestone lately. 

Periodic table notebooks coming along merrily. We read a bit about the element, I write some notes on a whiteboard, we watch a video about it and then they write down what they want.

Testing

We like to do standardized tests at the end of the year, often in May when the days feel lighter and other assignments have fallen away. It gives us a chance to have an outside assessment with unfamiliar language and formalized methods. Tests like the SAT, ACT and PSAT seem to be here to stay as a way to evaluate high school education, so familiarizing a child with these methods—who otherwise rarely sees even so much as a grade—can be good.

Taking the tests at home is admittedly a wildly unfair advantage for my students, because the kids can take long breaks in between sessions, stretch, talk out loud to themselves, etc. So if your results come back much higher than the national averages, keep that advantage in mind! 

Alternatively, if the Standford 10 test was administered to your child at school and you were shocked by their low scores, consider giving them the test again at home. You might be surprised by the results. 

The price is around $45 per student to sign up at home. 

Standford 10 Online testing (I prefer the abbreviated option, which is still quite lengthy!). 

Intriguing Me Right Now

Alpha School and the two hour adaptive app work day. Beginning the school day with two hours of adaptive apps (meaning apps that match the kid’s progress and move forward when they’ve shown comprehension) to cover the “core” subjects, and then the rest of the day spent in self-directed projects and group activities (like theater and maker labs and online college courses). Of course your first instinct is to say: WHAT ARE THE APPS, TELL ME, I’LL GOOGLE THEM NOW. They don’t share their proprietary mix, or at least not thoroughly. But listening to podcasts about this Austin-based school model has me very intrigued. What I like about it is the simple structure, the fact that it harnesses the technology to track where each kid is and allow them to excel without making them standout in the classroom (always a hazard for quick learners), yet it catches any missed concepts (always a hazard in the math classroom) before the student moves forward, the fact that the core subjects are still valued but they are given their place in the lineup of job/life readiness, and the possibility of what would effectively be one-on-one tutoring being available to every student.

I have written before about my interest in hacking the tax-funded public school into more of a community drop off/hang out center. We know teens today want more connection and more community structure. Use the public spaces and public employees to give children safe spaces to grow and learn all day. This model would encourage that riff—meeting (and possibly raising) test scores while encouraging individual interests.

a great movie: True Spirit

The dramatization of the true story of a girl sailing around the world alone at age 16. Beautifully shot and what an incredible story. The level of public outrage and disdain that the family faced in helping her pursue her dreams just reminds one of how narrow our minds truly are about adolescence these days. I appreciated how much time was given to how hard she worked in advance to prove it would be safe. Euphoric, educational, and inspiring: a wonderful family movie, although there is one scene when you believe she’s going to die and that was hard on one of the kids that had been most closely relating to her experience. Sarah Miller notes that she was glad her kids weren’t watching as it would have been too intense for them. So, as with all family recommendations, evaluate beforehand.

and a poem for you

Will You?
by Carrie Fountain

When, at the end, the children wanted
to add glitter to their valentines, I said no.

I said nope, no, no glitter, and then,
when they started to fuss, I found myself

saying something my brother’s football coach
used to bark from the sidelines when one

of his players showed signs of being
human: oh come on now, suck it up.

That’s what I said to my children.
Suck what up? my daughter asked,

and, because she is so young, I told her
I didn’t know and never mind, and she took

that for an answer. My children are so young
when I turn off the radio as the news turns

to counting the dead or naming the act,
they aren’t even suspicious. My children

are so young they cannot imagine a world
like the one they live in. Their God is still

a real God, a whole God, a God made wholly
of actions. And I think they think I work

for that God. And I know they will someday soon
see everything and they will know about

everything and they will no longer take
never mind for an answer. The valentines

would’ve been better with glitter, and my son
hurt himself on an envelope, and then, much

later, when we were eating dinner, my daughter
realized she’d forgotten one of the three

Henrys in her class. How can there be three Henrys
in one class? I said, and she said, Because there are.

And so, before bed we took everything out
again—paper and pens and stamps and scissors—

and she sat at the table with her freshly washed hair
parted smartly down the middle and wrote

WILL YOU BE MINE, HENRY T.? and she did it
so carefully, I could hardly stand to watch.

---

🌿 I don’t have a poem to tell you this but please remember how valuable everything you give to your family is and how it does tilt the sands of time and fate. xo Rachael