It is absurd and stupid to blame teachers for students that do not do class work, homework, and study for tests or read books outside class.
Washington D.C. and the president of the United States are demanding that teachers do the impossible.
We must repeal the No Child Left Behind Act and enact into law “No Student and/or Parent Ignored” (NSPI), because that is what we are doing—ignoring the students and parents.
An old friend suggested this idea, and it is how America will resolve its problems with public education.
The reason students do not show gains on the Academic Proficiency Index is NOT because of bad or boring teachers or teacher unions. It is because most of those students are not doing homework, studying for tests or reading outside of school and many are not reading in school.
Since no one in Washington D.C. and/or the White House has placed blame where it should be, on students and parents, then why should students work?
Students must be held responsible to learn but they are not. Instead, many are encouraged to feel good and have fun and/or are ignored by parents.
After all, thanks to “No Child Left Behind”, parents are not responsible for their child’s education—only teachers have been held responsible. However, teachers cannot follow 150 to 200 students home and make sure they do homework, read and study each day.
A Kaiser Generation M2 – Kids/Youth/Media Survey (January 2010) said, “Total Media Exposure for all 8 to 18 year old’s average amount of time spend with each medium in a typical day was 10:45 hours
That average 10:45 hours was divided up with 4:29 hours spent watching TV; 2:31 hours listening to music; 1:29 hours on the computer; 1:13 hours playing video games; 30 minutes reading print media, and 25 minutes watching a movie.
If this is what the “average” child is doing daily in the US, when are they doing homework, reading or studying?
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to “Crazy Normal”, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
How much of an “average” American parent are you? Take this quiz to find out. You may want to write the scores on a piece of paper then add them at the end to discover your final grade. The grade scale is listed at the end.
1. What describes the amount of time (on average) your family and/or children watch TV daily. (Read Avoiding the Mainstream Parenting Trap – Part 1 and Part 2 to understand the importance of the first four questions.)
6 hours (30 points)
5 hours (25 points)
4 hours (20 points)
3 hours ( 15 points)
2 hours ( 10 points)
more than 1 hour daily but less than 2 (7 points)
about 3 hours a week or less (no points—good for you!)
2. Video games
The video games in our house are kept in the child’s room and are not locked up. He or she may play any time and as much as he or she wants (20 points)
My child has one or more video games that are not kept in the child’s room, and (on average) the family and/or children play daily for twenty minutes or more (10 points)
My child has one or more video games that are kept locked up, and he or she plays once or twice a week (five points)
My child has one or more video games that are kept locked up, and he or she plays once or twice a month (one point)
There are no video games in our home (no points—good for you!)
3. If your child has a mobile cell phone, does he or she send and receive text messages and if so, how many (on average) each month?
1500 or more (50 points)
1000 (40 points)
750 (30 points)
500 (20 points)
250 (15 points)
100 (10 points)
50 (5 points)
My child does not have a mobile cell phone (no points—good for you!)
4. How much time does your child spend on the Internet on sites such as Facebook?
more than 2 hours daily (25 points)
between one and two hours daily (20 points)
about one hour daily (15 points)
less than one hour daily (10 points)
about three or four hours a week (5 points)
less than three hours a week (3 points)
less than two hours a week. (2 points)
less than one hour a week. (1 point)
My child is not allowed to social network in the Internet (no points—good for you!)
For example, a nutritious breakfast might be a bowl of steel-cut organic oatmeal (this may be bought in bulk and is not expensive) and/or one soft or hardboiled egg, and one or more of the following: a banana, apple, orange, some melon the size of a fist, or two kiwi (or another real piece of fruit) and a glass of “real” orange juice with no sugar added.
If you answered YES, the score is ZERO (good for you!). If you answered NO, the score is 50.
Note:Sources for healthy protein: grass fed organic beef or organic free range chicken (6 ounces a day); legumes (peanuts are a legume as are pinto and kidney beans) or nuts such as raw or dry roasted almonds, cashews, Brazil nuts, pecans, sunflower seeds etc. (no salt)
7. Is your child considered obese? If you do not know, go to Kids Health.org and read the five-part post about Overweight and Obesity. If you have trouble reading, there is a “Listen” function. (Read Avoiding the Mainstream Parenting Trap – Part 5 to understand the importance of questions 7, 8 and 9)
If you answered YES, the score is 50. If you answered NO, the score is ZERO (good for you!).
8. Does your ENTIRE family sit down at the same table without a TV or computer or video game or cell phone or music playing and eat a home cooked meal at least six days a week; does that meal include more vegetables than meat and sweet deserts, and does your family talk during this meal and no one can get up until everyone is done? Is the main beverage water?
If you answered NO, the score is 50. If you answered YES, the score is ZERO (good for you).
My child mostly earns FAILING GRADES and/or “D’s” from academic subjects such as history, science, math, English, journalism and/or a foreign language (PE, art, drama, chorus, band — do not count as academic subjects) EARN 50 points
My child earns “C’s” or better for all academic subjects (never earns a “D” or a FAILING grade) EARN 25 POINTS
My child earns “B’s” or better for all academic subjects (never earns “C’s”, “D’s” or FAILING GRADES) EARN 5 points
My child has earned all “A’s” from academic classes every year he or she has been in school. (subtract 100 points from the total—WOW!!!!!!)
NOTE: Good, demanding teachers do not give grades. Students earn them by reading both in and out of school, doing class work, doing homework and studying for tests and quizzes. At home, a child should read a half hour or more daily, 365 days a year. Books are the best source for reading. Libraries loan them free. There is no excuse to not read. The more one reads, the more literate he or she will be.
EVALUATION—To learn what your score means, compare your total with the following grade scale. [Earning an A, B or C may indicate you are not an “average” American parent. This is good!]
If I were grading this quiz as a teacher, an “A” would be a score between 42 (A-) and ZERO (A+)—Congratulations, you may be an outstanding parent!
To earn a B, the score would be between 43 (B+) and 83 (B-)—Congratulations, you may be an excellent parent!
To earn a “C”, the score would be between 84 (B+) to 124 (B-)—Congratulations, you may be a good parent.
To earn a “D”, the score would be between 125 (D+) to 166 (D-)—Improvement needed!!!
FAILURE falls between 167 (F+) and 415 (F-)
NOTE— Childhood as defined by the law in America is to the age of 18, but it is possible that an individual will live to be 80 or older. This means he or she will be an adult for possibly sixty-two years or more.
Poverty and poor health is not fun.
If you earned a FAILING grade on this quiz and are unwilling to improve as a parent, why did you have children? Was it an accident? Do you know that love means sacrifice and a willingness to say no and mean it? Why would you want to poison your children with bad food and focus on too much fun instead of having the child work toward earning a good education that may lead to a more financially secure and healthy future as an adult?
_______________________
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Since I was a public school teacher from 1975 to 2005, I saw the self-esteem movement among parents change the schools. I not only saw it but my job as a teacher was made more difficult as false self-esteem became the focus of the “average” American parent and not academics. Instead childhood “fun” replaced “work”, which is what a child must do to learn.
Due to the self-esteem movement, there was pressure for grade inflation and dummying down the curriculum so it would be easier on the students to be successful and feel good about him or herself.
Once the “average” child started spending that 10:45 hours a day talked about in Part 2, students went home and put pressure on parents still practicing old-world parenting methods.
Research shows that peer pressure has a much greater impact on adolescent behavior than any other factor.
Think about it. Your teenager spends more of his or her waking hours with peers than with family members. That interaction is more powerful than the influence of teachers and other authority figures. If a child feels compelled to fit in, the teen may do things that go against his or her beliefs simply to be part of the group.
Peer pressure may lead to experimentation with drugs and alcohol, sex, skipping school, and various high-risk behaviors. If you notice a sudden change in your child’s appearance, clothing, and attitude, especially if accompanied by secretive behavior, the child may be succumbing to the influences of peers.
Parents should be especially alert to sudden changes in the friends who make up their core peer group. An unexplained change in the type of friends your child associates with could indicate that your child is vulnerable to new influences that may not be positive. Source: Aspen Education.com
The need of teens to conform to peer group norms and values has often been witnessed by teenager workers as well as parents. When one refers to the “tyranny of teens”, one is expressing an awesome appreciation of the powerful energy and pressures generated by this strange social configuration called the peer group.
Parent/s often surrender to the power of the teen subculture. The parent/s experience feelings of futility. “There’s nothing I can do; they won’t listen anymore.”
When that happens, the teenager is left trying to manage his life while the adult ponders just where his approach went wrong. Another variation in a parent’s response to the teens peer subculture is enlistment in the opposition thinking, “If you can’t beat them, join them.”
Then one or more parents try to become like a teenager leading to an ineffective parenting. In Part 7, I will write about a proven way to overcome the negative influence of peer pressure.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Parents are a vital element of a child and teen’s education. Parents must be involved even if the children are attending public or private schools.
Teachers cannot do it all.
Students must read daily at home, do classwork, homework, and study for tests. The job of a parent is to make sure the student does that work. If a student fails a class while attending school, the main reason is he or she was not doing the work or studying while in class or at home and the parent failed in his or her job.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, there are about 64 million students in primary through secondary schools in America, while It has been estimated that 1.5 million students were homeschooled in the United States in 2007 (with a confidence interval of 1.3 to 1.7 million), constituting 2.9% of students.
It’s obvious that if a parent is teaching his or her children at home, the family is spending quality time together instead of watching too much TV, playing video games, sending text messages, or social networking on the Internet (see Recognizing Good Parenting – Part 2 for the average breakdown of time for each activity).
Instead, home taught students talk several hours a day with parents, and it pays off.
Academic statistics for home-taught students is impressive.
In 1997, a study of 5,402 home school students from 1,657 families was released. It was entitled, Strengths of Their Own: Home Schoolers Across America. The study demonstrated that homeschoolers, on average, out-performed their counterparts in the public schools by 30 to 37 percentile points in all subjects.
This was confirmed in another study by Dr. Lawrence Rudner of 20,760 homeschooled students, which found the homeschoolers who have been home taught their entire mandatory school years had the highest academic achievement.
Another important finding of Strengths of Their Own was that the race of the student does not make any difference. There was no significant difference between minority and white homeschooled students. For example, in grades K-12, both white and minority students scored, on the average, in the 87th percentile.
The motivations for home schooling are based on a concern about the school environment (85% of parents that teach at home); a desire to provide religious or moral instruction (72% of parents); and a dissatisfaction with academic instruction at schools 68%.
There are other reasons but these three areas make up the majority.
In addition, Ordination.orgreports, “For the third consecutive year, ACT college admissions test scores are higher for homeschoolers than for other students. Homeschoolers’ average composite score was 22.8, compared to the national average of 21, out of a possible 36. On the SAT, homeschoolers, who comprise less than 1 percent of test takers, earned 568 verbal and 532 in math. The national average…was 505 verbal and 514 math.”
– 71% of homeschoolers actively participate in the community. Traditionally schooled students averaged only 37%.
– 76% of homeschoolers were more likely to be involved in civic affairs, compared to only 36% of their public-schooled counterparts.
– 58.9% of the homeschoolers surveyed reported they were “very happy” with life, in contrast to 27.6% of traditional students.
If you are a parent that is home teaching your children, breathe a sigh of relief, because the odds are that you do not fit the definition of the American “average” or “norm” for a parent.
Another factor that plays an important role in being a parent is peer pressure among teens, which I will deal with in Part 6.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
A poor lifestyle and diet leads to health problems and health problems affect mental development, which may result in a child with a poor education and low literacy skills.
Studies show that breakfast is important, but when I asked my students during the thirty years I taught (1975-2005) how many ate breakfast each morning, only a few indicated they did. Most didn’t.
However, a study of over 59,000 children and teenagers in Europe consistently indicated that eating (a nutritious) breakfast was protective against becoming obese and reducing one body mass index (BMI).
Why is breakfast and good nutrition important? The adequacy of nutrition during the early formative (childhood) years may have long-term consequences on the brain. Because shrinkage of the brain actually begins in young adulthood, any insidious influence of diet could begin early and progress over a period of many decades. Clearly, diet is influential on brain growth and function throughout the entire lifespan. Source: Psychology Advice
In addition, in the last 2 decades, type 2 diabetes (formerly known as adult-onset diabetes) has been reported among U.S. children and adolescents with increasing frequency.… Studies indicate one-third of U.S. children born in 2000 could develop diabetes during their lifetime.
Studies also link diabetes to a decline in mental function. For “relatively mild” type 2 diabetes, Diabetes patients…were slower on tasks requiring rapid and precise processing of new verbal information. Source: Diabetes, Obesity, Cardiovascular Disease
Other studies show that a loss of brain cells and memory function may result (from diabetes), especially in the hippocampus—a brain region involved in learning and memory.
Scientists are only beginning to understand how general cognitive deficits occur, but new studies are providing some clues. Source: Society for Neuroscience
Today, the average adult consumes about 150 pounds of sugar a year.
To discover health problems caused by too much sugar consumption, watch the embedded video. To learn more, discover the history of refined sugar.
Poor childhood health has life-long impacts, with devastating effects on a child’s education and future socioeconomic status. Childhood obesity is especially paralyzing. Research has shown that once a child has become obese, he or she struggles simply to pursue an education.
If the current childhood obesity trend in the United States continues, by 2050, at least half the population will be obese and could very possibly be less educated than the overall population today.
Nearly one-fifth of U.S. children ages 2 to 19 are obese (today), and recent estimates in schoolchildren indicate the obesity rate is as high as one-third in some rural areas. Source: Britannica Blog
There are three highly successful, documented parenting methods in the US. In Part 5, we will discover the advantages of being home taught instead of attending a public or private school, which proves that the more time a parent spends with his or her child, the better chance that child has for academic success.
Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran.
His latest novel is the award winning Running with the Enemy. Blamed for a crime he did not commit while serving in Vietnam, his country considers him a traitor. Ethan Card is a loyal U.S. Marine desperate to prove his innocence or he will never go home again.
And the woman he loves and wants to save was trained to kill Americans.
To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”
Wanna Be bet his future on a belief that he didn’t need to get an education because he was going to be drafted into Major League Baseball (MLB) and earn millions.
My brother Richard’s (1935 – 1999) oldest daughter (from his second marriage) graduated from high school engaged to another student that had signed a contract to pitch for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The weekend after he signed the contract, he threw a wild party to celebrate. A fight broke out and he was hit in the head with a baseball bat and lost his ability to pitch. The contract was cancelled and no money changed hands.
Depressed, he fell into booze and drugs along with my niece, and the marriage fell apart.
I don’t know if Wanna Be’s dream came true but most don’t.
I recently read that an average of 40,000 young people flood Hollywood annually dreaming of being the next super star to eventually win an Academy Award.
However, less than one percent lands a role on TV or in film let alone super-star status.
The tragedy is that Wanna Be wasn’t alone. Too many of the students I taught saw no reason to work in school since they had been convinced by a parent boosting the child’s self-esteem that if the child dreamed it, that dream would come true, which is another absurd example of the damage caused by the Self-Esteem movement.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
I don’t recall this student’s name so I’ll call him “Wanna Be”, and he was convinced he was going to be a big league pitcher. He often disrupted the class by announcing that baseball scouts were already watching him and his future was guaranteed.
Wanna Be saw no reason to read the assignments, study for tests, or do homework and he failed both semesters.
In the mornings before first period, I’d often run into Wanna Be before he had his liquid-sugar breakfast and he was a friendly guy—nothing like the surely, moody monster that walked into my fifth period after lunch with a 64 ounce Coke in hand.
The sugar he consumed at lunch often resulted in glazed eyes, a slack jaw, slurred speech and a serious change in behavior.
Liquid Sugar is Toxic
The student snack bar, which was more of a fast food outlet that served mostly French fries, pizza slices, nachos smothered in cheese and hamburgers, sold 64 ounce Cokes for less than a dollar.
Near the end of my teaching career, the high school also had soda machines installed in the hallways to make money for the school district. The vender split the profits.
One morning, I ran into the truck driver stocking the machines and asked how many sodas the students drank. I recall that he said he stocked an average of 2,000 cases a week in the machines at Nogales and a case held 24 Cokes—that’s 48,000 Cokes a week at one high school. The high school had about 3,000 students. You do the math.
To be fair, the machines also sold water but most of the students hooked on this liquid candyhated water and had no qualms saying how horrible water tasted.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
When I decided to write this post about one of the students I taught at Nogales High School in La Puente, California, I thought of The Natural, a baseball movie starring Robert Redford, Robert Duvall, and Glenn Close, where an average baseball player comes out of seemingly nowhere to become a legendary player with almost divine talent.
This is what Hollywood does best—the stuff dreams are made of.
Then I Googled “baseball movies” and discovered a Site listing almost 200 from A to Z (there wasn’t one for “Z”, but “Y” had Yankees West and The Yankles.
If you love baseball as many Americans do, you may want to visit Boston Baseball.com.
I even searched for “Baseball Movies” on YouTube, which resulted in more than five-hundred thousand hits, and I was sucked into watching a few clips.
I could have watched baseball videos for hours on YouTube. I suspect entire movies are there ten minutes at a time.
However, that wasn’t what I wanted to write about.
I wanted to write about one student of the thousands I taught. He was in one of my ninth grade English classes.
He hated water as many Americans do, and often started school with a liquid breakfast followed by a liquid lunch and a bag of greasy French fries. Then he arrived at his English class—my fifth period.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
To subscribe to Crazy Normal, look for the “Subscribe” button at the top of the screen in the menu bar, click on it then follow directions.
Larry Summers cites in his debate with Amy Chua that Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard emphasizing what those “two” achieved without a university education.
While Gates was building Microsoft and Zuckerberg Facebook, do you believe these two billionaires spent ten hours a day doing what the average American child (raised by SAPs such as Summers) does to enjoy the first quarter of his or her life?
Summers doesn’t mention that Warren Buffet, one of the richest men on the planet, attended the Wharton Business school at the University of Pennsylvania for two years then transferred to the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Working part time, he managed to graduate in only three years.
Summers doesn’t mention that it is common that the top one percent of executives with annual incomes of $500,000 or more often have Ivy league educations from universities such as Stanford, Harvard, Yale or Princeton.
“Asian countries value education more than other countries.”
Summers doesn’t mention that the top 15% of the upper-middle class are highly educated and often have graduate degrees while earning a high 5-figure annual income commonly above $100,000.
To be specific, the median personal income for a high school drop out in the US with less than a 9th grade education is $17,422, and with some college that medium income jumps to $31,054, while a person with a professional university degree earns an annual medium income of $82,473. Source: Wiki Academic Models (this source was citing US Census data).
It’s okay if Summers and his fellow SAPs let their children and teens have fun the first eighteen years of life, but don’t forget, the average life span in the US is 78.3 years.
What are those children going to do for enjoyment while working to earn a living the next 60.3 years as an adult?
Most children raised by Tiger Moms such as Amy Chua shouldn’t have to worry. Those children (as adults) will probably be in the top 15% of income earners and enjoy life much more than those earning less than $18 thousand annually.
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
One definition of the word “SAP” means “a foolish gullible person”. I copied that from Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, and Larry Summers sounds as if he were a member of the “SAP” generation.
A friend forwarded a link to Larry Summers vs. Tiger Mom, which was published in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on January 27, 2011.
Larry Summers, who has billed himself as a “hard ass”, was President Barack Obama’s top economic advisor for the last few years.
Summers recently left the White House to return to Harvard as a professor then had a debate with Chinese-American “Tiger Mom,” Amy Chua, who wrote an essay that appeared in the WSJ with a headline (she didn’t write), which said, Why Chinese Mothers are Superior.
Summers said why go through all the trouble to earn a university education when computers are eventually going to do the work that requires discipline.
He also said, “People on average live a quarter of their lives as children. That’s a lot. It’s important that they be as happy as possible during those 18 years. That counts too.”
Summers isn’t alone in his belief that children should focus on being happy instead of academic excellence.
The average American parent belonging to the Self-esteem arm of Political Correctness (more SAPs) spends less than five minutes a day encouraging his or her child to be happy, which explains why the average American child enjoys watching TV (4:29 hours daily); socializing on sites such as Facebook (1:29 hours); playing video games (1:13 hours); listening to music (2:31 hours) while managing to send an average of 50 text messages daily. Source: A Kaiser Generation M2 – Youth Media Survey in January 2010 (other studies support these numbers).
Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 