Tag Archives: challenges

Parents Today

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It’s a catchy title, ‘Parents Today’, an invite to go on a rant and share how society has changed and how parents are the problem. And, yes, this is a bit of a rant, but I want to start by saying this is a trend, not an issue with every parent… but it is indeed something I’ve seen more and more of.

That said, I’ve shared before, and I still believe that parents are our partners in education, and I believe it really does take a community to raise a child. And when we work together as educators and parents we can do great things. I’ve seen this in action. We had two sisters thrive at our school. One of them was able to train 20+ hours a week at her sport, still had time in Grade 12 to follow her passions, compose, produce, and sing an entire album of songs, and get high enough grades to get into the university program of her choice.

Her younger sister joined us and was quiet, and I wasn’t sure if she was enjoying herself. Then at the second PAC (Parent Advisory Council) meeting, her mom pulled me aside afterwards to have a private conversation. She got teary-eyed and thanked me and asked me to thank the teachers. She said that this was the first time in her younger daughter’s entire school experience that she wanted to go to school. She said school from preschool to grade 8 was joyless for her daughter, it was a chore to get her to school, and like pulling teeth to get her to say anything nice about her schooling.

She told me what a delight it was to see her daughter waking up and wanting to go to school. What a joy it was to have her come home and share what she was learning. How heartwarming it was to see her smile when she spoke about school. Her mom didn’t realize that this was equally heartwarming for me and my staff to hear.

We can get things right.

But in all honesty, sometimes we don’t. Sometimes we can have challenges where a kid struggles and we have to work together to make things better. And again, when we approach challenges as a team, we can often make things better. Not always, but frequently… and this is where the rant sneaks in. I’ve noticed that it could be a lot more frequent if it wasn’t for (some) parents today.

We have parents that overshare information and humiliate their children in front of us. They embarrass their kids with private details that makes the kid feel too ashamed to look to educators for support and assistance.

We have parents that blame educators for a student not learning something. Who expect every possible accommodation for their child, and literally expect us to take the challenge out of learning. They fail to see that learning doesn’t stick when there is no effort associated with the process. They’ll watch their kid spend hours on a video game to perfect a level, then the same kid will put zero effort into an assignment and it’s the educator’s fault because he or she doesn’t understand how their kid learns.

We have parents who see themselves as their child’s friend and advocate, and will not parent them when they need a parent. They will let their child have a device in their room so they can play games or socialize until 3am, then claim it’s too hard to get them to school in the morning. ‘Turn off the wifi? Take their device away? We couldn’t do that.’ Make them go to school tired to understand the consequences of their actions? ‘Oh, no. My kid needs his rest, he’d be too upset if we did that.’

We have parents defend their child, claiming they did the work themselves, even when it’s obvious that they cheated or plagiarized. ‘Just so you know, I was sitting next to her when she wrote that.’ Actually lying to protect them like that is some sort of favour. It doesn’t matter that the child can’t define several of the words used, or that all other writing done in a supervised environment is both structurally different, and reads as if it was written by someone with a weaker vocabulary.

In each of these examples, the parent thinks they are doing their child a favour. They believe they are being advocates. Meanwhile, rather than working with educators to help their child, they are adversarial, confrontational, and/or passively harming their child by not being a parent.

The rise in number of parents I saw doing these kind of things in my last decade of education was concerning. Parents will spend more time getting Chat GPT to argue a case for their child’s ‘defence’ than they will actually parenting their child, or listening to a teacher. They will hear only their child’s perspective and come into the school with metaphorical guns blazing to defend them when the issue was minor and could have been resolved with a simple inquiry. They will send a scathing email to a teacher, realize there was a misunderstanding and then send a meek apology or no apology at all when the small concern is cleared up… Then they wonder why a teacher’s future communication to them doesn’t seem warm and caring… and claim that the teacher doesn’t like their kid.

As a principal, no matter how upset a parent was, I always started a meeting thinking, ‘We are on the same team, we both want what’s best for their child/our student.’ I’ve had hard conversations with teachers, students, and parents as a result of those conversations.

But the hardest conversations where with parents who I had to walk on eggshells around because their child, who was not being a good student, was being ruthlessly defended… And anything I said to suggest their kid had work to do was dealt with as evidence that a collective ‘we’, everyone at school, was at fault… Meanwhile I had a team of exasperated educators doing all they could with a supportive lens.

Schools can still work when there is a kid or two with parents like this, but I watched their number rise. I saw the pressure it put on educators… especially after the challenges of Covid. We are at a time when kids need the whole community to support them, and I’m seeing too many parents work against rather than with the school community.

It’s these kinds of parents that are one of the biggest problems in education today.

High contrast lives

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It’s amazing how differently people live in the world. Growing up in Barbados and moving to Canada in the late 70’s, I faced a fare bit of culture shock. This is quite a different experience than a student at my school who has only ever left the province to go one province over, and hasn’t even been to the USA, just a 30 minute drive away.

But even that contrast isn’t comparable to a friend who grew up in a village with no electricity or running water, who now lives in a gorgeous home a couple towns over from us. She shared how her first husband was embarrassed by her when they went to a big city for the first time and she was frightened to go on an escalator. She’s younger than me and she has lived in worlds that seem 100 years apart.

This exposure to different worlds extends beyond travel. I spoke to a 91 year old man today and he shared how his father never once hugged him, and so he made sure that his kids always got hugs. Some people break the trauma cycle, others get stuck in it. Again, the contrast can be so extreme.

We walk around blindly unaware of what challenges people have faced or are currently facing. We see kids acting out and blame them for their outbursts, unknowing of what challenges they face at home. We fall into patterns in relationships that are affected by past relationships both in positive and negative ways.

Some people are exposed to experiences you or I could not imagine. Some of them do so with poise and grace. Others struggle and deal with more than we could handle, and might not be able to handle it themselves.

People do the best they can with what they’ve got. We don’t always know where they have come from, or what they’ve had to deal with. We don’t see the contrast, and so maybe we shouldn’t be too quick to judge.

Celebrating challenges

I watched a few student presentations yesterday. Each one was excellent in their own way. But my favourite moment came when one student presenting on her Independent Directed Study put up a slide with the single word, ‘Challenges’ on it. She got excited and started with, “OK, I’ve been waiting to share this with you!”

I love the way our students perceive challenges and failures. They recognize that this is part of the learning journey. They celebrate the discoveries they make and the effort and perseverance it takes to overcome unexpected challenges along the way.

Here is a student that has done an amazing project, with a great outcome, and she can’t wait to share her challenges that lead to success. This happens because we embed the expectation that students will find challenges along the way. We expect them to share those challenges as part of their learning journey. As a result, the challenges become a big part of the learning, they become the focal point of where real learning begins.

An ‘A’ student that breezes through problems as if they were not problems doesn’t learn as much as another student who stumbled along the way and got to the same results. The journey is less memorable, less rewarding. It’s overcoming challenges that make a learning experience valuable, and seeing our students celebrate the challenges they met on there learning journey is extremely rewarding.

Not the same mistakes

Before I share this, no, it’s not a reflection on my parenting. I’m not wallowing in worry about how I’m messing my kids up. This is just one of the most powerful comics I’ve ever seen, and I think about it a lot as a school principal. Also, profanity warning for the comic below.

Now that I’ve got the disclaimer out of the way, let me share that I think this is one of the most challenging times to grow up in the last few decades. More young adults are living longer with their parents, or committing long hours to be able to afford rent. Many have not hit 25 yet and they don’t see themselves ever owning a house, or having a back yard like the one they had as a kid. Many more are disillusioned by what they see in the news and on social media.

Meanwhile, parents are doing their best not to make the mistakes of their parents, and yet struggling to navigate what that looks like. Some parents are doing all they can to help a disengaged kid stay in school. Others are lost trying to figure out inappropriate behavior. Still others are doing everything to protect their child, but preventing them from learning from failure. And still others are doing everything ‘right’, which works for one kid and doesn’t work for another.

And those are the resourceful parents that are trying their absolute best. They aren’t the divorced parents who fight in front of the kids every time the kids are passed off. They aren’t the ones struggling with their own demons of abuse, drugs, or mental illness. Still doing the best they can with the skills they have, but just not skilled in ways that support their kids.

We don’t want to make the same mistakes our parents did. We don’t want to follow the same patterns. That can be, but probably isn’t, a disparaging complaint about our own parents. Rather it’s a recognition that we want to do better, be better.

But try as we might, family dynamics is challenging, the world we live in is challenging, and this comic sums up the parenting challenge perfectly.

Team support

When things are going well, it’s easy to compliment a team. Success and smooth sailing can make a team look good. Everyone is doing the role they should, and ‘results speak for themselves’. But what happens to that team when there is a crisis? How do they react then?

When things go wrong, when challenges arise, what does team support look like then? Does the team start to point fingers and blame others? Do they rally with or against each other? Do they seek advice from their colleagues or do they spew orders, demands, and/or expectations?

If you want to know how good a team is, watch them when things are tough. See how they support one another. Pay attention to how they deal not just with the problem but with each other.

Any team can handle success well, but it takes a very special team to deal with challenging situations in a good way.

Oh, can’t complain

Today on a stroll through a Saturday Farmer’s Market I passed an interesting character. He was on the obese side of heavy, in a motorized wheelchair, in loud checkered pants, and a colourful muscle shirt that revealed his diabetes monitor on his arm. Just as I was passing him, he bumped into someone he knew and I heard his response to her question, “Oh, can’t complain.”

I find it fascinating that people who suffer the most, and need the most, are often the most optimistic and generous. I worked in a school for very high needs students, many of whom came from very needy families, yet their parents were far more likely to donate their time to a shelter or volunteer kitchen than at any other school I’ve ever worked at.

My thought of the day, “Quit yer bitch’in.”

So many people have so much more to worry about and yet they live a life where they ‘can’t complain’… so really, what do we have to complain about?

Life is amazing, there is so much to appreciate, so much to value and cherish. Live, laugh, love, and for your sake more than anyone else’s… stop complaining.

Reexamining the term FAILURE

Six years ago in Philadelphia I ran a session at Educon on Failure. Bill Ferriter came to the session and after the interactive presentation he created this image:

This was the premise I was working from,

When is failure really a success? When we engage students in EPIC projects and challenges, the journey to success is often fraught with failures that can prove to be amazing learning opportunities. 

Do we need to reexamine the use of the term ‘Failure’?

Our present education system is built around always finding the ‘right’ answer, but when can the wrong answer be valuable? How can we provide rich, meaningful opportunities for students to make mistakes, iterate, persevere and develop alternative approaches to problems relevant to what they are learning?

4 years before this presentation I created this image:

I shared an acronym that I came up with:

F ailure
A lways
I nvites
L earning

I share in an accompanying post,

Think of this: If students (regardless of skills and abilities) have only ever met success, and accomplished every task, assignment and project they have needed to do for school, then they weren’t pushed hard enough. In this case, it is the program that is the failure, because the students were not challenged as much as they should have been.

The learning potential of failure is significant. If the work is meaningful enough, there can be more learned from an epic failure, than a marginal success, where the measure for success was set too low.

We talk a lot about ‘learning through failure’ in education, but we don’t really mean failure. Because when a student takes lessons from something not working, then it’s a learning opportunity and not actually a failure.

When you think about it, lack of knowledge is where the learning begins. If you give students the knowledge, they don’t really learn, you actually rob students of their learning. You want them to struggle and to find the learning challenging. And if the challenge is authentic, if it’s really a challenge, then it’s not something they’ll get on the first try. So hitting the ‘failure point’ is part of learning. Trying to achieve too much needs to be part of the process… and so bumping into failure is an essential part of learning.

So a failure is only a failure if the challenge lacks reflection, resources, support, or effort. If these things are provided (by the teacher and more-so by the learner) then the learner didn’t actually fail. They may not achieve their original goal, but they invited learning into the attempt… and learning is achieved. That is not a failure.

The idea of learning through failure is actually not a failure at all. It is accepting that there are opportunities for learning in not achieving the intended goal but still identifying that there was learning to be acquired and often the struggle is something that makes this kind of learning stick.

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Related: This Ignite presentation on Transforming Our Learning Metaphors:

Who isn’t playing Wordle?

I am not someone that keeps up with trends. Never have been. Right now it seems that many, many people I know are playing Wordle daily. Not me.

From what I understand, you are trying to find a 5 letter word, you start with a guess, and if you get a letter that’s right, but in the wrong place, you get a yellow square over that letter. If you get the right letter in the right place, it becomes a green square.

Basically this is the game Mastermind with letters in instead of colours, only the setup of the hidden pieces isn’t random, it has to be an actual word. And your game card is only 6 words long.

It looks like fun. People seem to be connecting over it. I have nothing bad to say about it… I’m just not adding it as yet another digital distraction to my day. At least now I have enough knowledge about what’s going on so that when I see something like this, I actually understand it.

If like me, you aren’t playing along, now you know a bit more about it. For those that are playing daily… I saw a TikTok that said IRATE was the best starting word, but no! According to a computer scientist that did the calculations, it’s LATER. You are welcome, and have fun!

Memory challenges

I was searching for a song on my phone and couldn’t remember the artist. That’s an issue with me, I struggle with proper nouns… not just people’s names, but street names, titles of songs or books, basically any noun that is specific to a person or an item. It’s not a fun thing to struggle with.

I can remember times in my teaching career when I’d look at a kid in my class in June, after seeing the kid every weekday for 10 months, and draw a blank on their name. I know them, I can tell you about their Grandmother’s pet dog’s surgery they told me about back in September. I know exactly who the kid is, but I’m cycling through the alphabet in my head hoping either a first or last name will pop into my brain.

I describe it as when a proper name gets filed away in my head, that file doesn’t get stored with all the other files related to that person or object. My family are used to it, they will try to fill in the gap when I have a long pregnant pause. One example is that we live next to a No Frills grocery store. It has been there for over a decade, and my daughter worked there for about 3 years. But the name will slip my mind and it’s just gone. I can see the sign with the bananas on it in my head but even the words in the sign don’t show up as part of my recall.

The worst is introductions. The closest I ever got to a panic attack was as a VP at a teacher night. My principal said in front of the audience of parents that I would introduce the teachers. This wasn’t part of the plan and I freaked out (on the inside). He and I were both comfortable in front of an audience and he knew that, and didn’t think anything of tossing this my way. But he didn’t know what a challenge this was for me. I was looking at the row of teachers and one name would not come to me. It was painful because I knew this teacher better than most of them. I was wracking my brain for her name from about 3 introductions before hers. As I was introducing the person that was just before her, it clicked and I made it through the list. I begged the principal never to do that to me again and explained how hard it was for me.

My wife knows that, in social situations, if I don’t lead with an introduction, to step in and introduce herself. It usually goes really smoothly because when she does that, I continue on and tell her what the connection is, because I know the person and it’s just the name that’s a blank. And so in this interaction I don’t come off as not knowing the person, instead it just comes off as my wife beating me to the introduction.

I’ve read books about remembering names, and I do all the tricks when I meet someone. And for that first interaction, it’s in my short term memory and I’ll remember the name. But a few days later I’ll draw a blank. The most embarrassing moment is when I forget a name and ask, and it’s David. That’s awful. Can’t even remember their name and it’s my name.

Of all the things that hinder me the most day to day, it’s not names of people but names of streets. Someone will give me directions and throw a name of a common street at me, and the map in my head would not include that street… a street that I might travel on all the time. Google maps helps me out with that though. And giving directions to my own house, I sometimes forget the name of the cross street right in front of my house, and I’ve lived here for 23 years.

I look forward to the time when I’m wearing glasses that will recognize people for me and project their name inside my glasses. Until then, if I blank out on your name, it’s not about you, it’s my issue. I know who you are, I just filed your name in the wrong place.

Oh, and that musical artist I was looking for, it was Tori Amos. I didn’t end up remembering myself, I described what I was looking for and my wife told me her name.

Puzzled

Today my family went to an Escape/Breakout room. A fun place where you work in small groups to solve puzzles and escape the room(s) before time runs out. Along the way, you can ask for help a couple times.

We asked for help, we didn’t break out, we ran out of time.

I find that I enjoy puzzles, but I’m not good with time limits. I slip down rabbit holes and spend a long time on cold trails, hoping they’ll get hot. I will spend way too long looking for clues where they are none, while oblivious to the clues right in front of my face.

Sometimes I can solve complex puzzles and sometimes I miss the simple solutions to easier puzzles. Sometimes I can get stumped again and again and persevere without success. Other times my perseverance is rewarded. I’ve learned that there are certain puzzles that captivate me, and some I have no patience for. But I do love to be puzzled, and I get a lot of joy out of solving complex puzzles, or at least trying.