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Category Archives: family values

Eager to Learn or Not – Part 3/10

12 Jul

After the NCLB act became law while President G. W. Bush was still in the White House, teachers had to be both teacher, parent and responsible for the student to learn, while most of the nation seemed to believe a modern fable that every child is equal and has a right by law to be happy all the time.

However, the Constitution of the United States, which offers protection for American citizens from the tyranny of government, uses the word “equal” only eight times.

Only once does the word “equal” refer to common citizens when the Constitution says the people have equal protection of the laws.

The other seven times the word “equal” deals with the process of government and has nothing to do with people outside of the federal or state systems.

In fact, studies prove that teachers are teaching while there is plenty of evidence that some students are not learning what is being taught.

If you don’t remember what your teachers taught you about the meaning of the US Constitution (Whose fault is that?), then I suggest you visit the U.S. Constitution online and search for the word “equal” and read each section where the word is used in any of its forms.

If you want to know where “equal” was used differently than the U.S. Constitution, you will have to discover that from the Declaration of Independence, which is not the law of the United States.

Instead, the Declaration of Independence was a document signed by America’s Founding Fathers and sent to the king of England as a notice that thirteen colonies in North America (except Canada) were willing to fight to be free of the British Empire.

Once the thirteen colonies earned their freedom from the British Empire, the Declaration of Independence, became history and has never been (before and after the revolution) the law that guides the US government.

Continued on July 13, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 4 or return to Part 2

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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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.

 
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Posted by on July 12, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Eager to Learn or Not – Part 2/10

11 Jul

After listening to the NPR.org piece about the Atlanta school scandal, I concluded that the enemies of public education (that by coincidence support the school choice voucher movement that would add billions of taxpayer dollars to the profit margins of private corporations) were at it again.

After all, the next presidential election of 2012 is starting to gather steam and the alleged failure of public education will be a topic of discussion with accusations being hurled about as if they were grenades in the hands of terrorists.

The pressure that caused these teachers and administrators in Atlanta’s public schools to cheat was due to the impossible demands set by No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which requires America’s teachers to teach as if all students are equal and eager to learn, which many are not.

An old English proverb says, “You can lead a horse to water but you can’t make it drink.”  This idiom means that if a teacher teaches he or she cannot force the student to learn regardless of a law written in Washington D.C. by a bunch of ignorant, elected fools.

For a child to learn, he or she must come to school motivated and ready to learn, and this is often not the case, which is the reason behind the fact that not all students are equal.

There is an equation/formula that shows what it takes for a student to learn.

This formula is as simple as 1 (teacher) + 1 (student) + 1 (parent) = 3.

1. The teacher teaches

2. The students listen/pay attention, follow directions, ask questions, study, read and learn

3, parents support both teachers and students so learning takes place

 If one or two elements of that equation are missing, the education process suffers.

Continued on July 12, 2011 in Eager to Learn or Not – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of The Concubine Saga. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too. This is the love story Sir Robert Hart did not want the world to discover.

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.

 
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Posted by on July 11, 2011 in American Public Schools, Education, family values, literacy, Parenting, Public School

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 4/4

29 Jun

Lori Gottlieb follows Amy Chua with Jean Twenge, a professor of psychology at San Diego State University that has written extensively about narcissism and self-esteem.  Twenge is also the co-author of Epidemic. Twenge says, when ego-boosting parents exclaim “Great Job!”, the child learned to feel that everything he does is special … he never gets negative feedback on his performance … They grew up in a bubble, so they get out into the real world and they start to feel lost and helpless.


“Season 2 – Episode 9 – Does anyone let their kids play outside anymore? Cross the street? Do their own homework? Tie their own shoe? How do we prepare our kids for the real world while keeping them in a protective bubble? Jen and Barb talk to Dr. Wendy Mogel, nationally known clinical psychologist and author of the New York Times best selling parenting book, “The Blessing of a Skinned Knee” about need to empower ourselves as Mothers to loosen the leash and let our kids fall, so they learn how to get up and are prepared for the future.”

Wendy Mogel told Gottlieb over the phone, “Please let them (kids) be devastated at age 6 and not have their first devastation be in college!” and “parents who protect their kids from accurate feedback teach them that they deserve special treatment.”

In fact, Twenge says, “Research shows that much better predictors of live fulfillment and success are perseverance, resiliency, and reality-testing—qualities that people need so they can navigate the day-to-day,” and many kids aren’t learning these skills anymore.

Near the conclusion of the Atlantic piece, Gottlieb said, “by trying  so hard to provide the perfectly happy childhood, we’re just making it harder for our kids to actually grow up.”

Return to Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3 or start with Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on June 29, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3/4

28 Jun

Then Wendy Mogel, a clinical psychologist in Los Angeles and the author of The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, echoes Kindlon’s words when she says, “Well-intentioned parents have been metabolizing their anxiety for them (their children) their entire childhoods, so they (the children) don’t know how to deal with it when they grow up.”


“Raising Cain is a 2-hour PBS documentary that explores the emotional development of boys in America today. Our guide in the program is child psychologist Michael Thompson, Ph.D. His book on the emotional lives of boys, “Raising Cain,” with co-author Dan Kindlon, was a New York Times bestseller. Raising Cain chronicles the lives of boys from birth through high school through powerful documentary stories about real boys. The interviews reveal the challenges and confusion that boys encounter while growing up in America.”

A family psychologist in Los Angeles, Jeff Blume, then told Lori Gottlieb, “A kid needs to feel normal anxiety to be resilient. If we want our kids to group up and be more independent, then we should prepare our kids to leave us every day.”

Eventually, Gottlieb mentions Amy Chua’s memoir, the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and says, many of today’s parents who are obsessed with their kids’ happiness share Chua’s desire for their children to have high achievement but without the sacrifice and struggle that this kind of achievement often requires.

Continued on June 29, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 4 or return to Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on June 28, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 2/4

27 Jun

Ann Hulbert, the author of Raising America: Experts, Parents, and a Century of Advice About Children says, there’s always been a tension among the various recommended parenting styles—the bonders versus the disciplinarians, the child-centered versus the parent-centered…

Following Gretchen Rubin, Lori Gottlieb quotes Barry Schwartz, a professor of social theory at Swarthmore College, who says, “happiness as a goal is a recipe for disaster.”


“Psychologist Barry Schwartz takes aim at a central tenet of western societies: freedom of choice. In Schwartz’s estimation, choice has made us not freer but more paralyzed, not happier but more dissatisfied.”

Then Paul Bohn, a psychiatrist at UCLA believes, “Many parents will do anything to avoid having their kids experience even mild discomfort, anxiety, or disappointment…with the result that when, as adults, they experience the normal frustrations of life, they think something must be terribly wrong.

Dan Kindlon, the author of Too Much of a Good Thing: Raising Children of Character in an Indulgent Age, says, If kids can’t experience painful feelings, they won’t develop “psychological immunity”. He also said, “We (parents) don’t set limits, because we want our kids to like us at every moment, even though it is better for them if sometimes they can’t stand us.”

Continued on June 28, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 3 or return to Part 1

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on June 27, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 1/4

26 Jun

At the end of What, Me Worry about Debt! I’ve got self-esteem protecting me, I mentioned Lori Gottlieb’s piece in The Atlantic magazine, “How to Land Your Kid in Therapy” and said I’d be writing about what she had to say.  This is it.

It is always good to know someting about the experts we read or hear, so who is Lori Gottlieb? Well, she graduated from Stanford Medical School, is an author, a journalist, a columnist and a psychotherapist. For the longer version, click on the first link in this paragraph.

Gottlieb mentions Gretchen Rubin, the author of New York Times best-seller “The Happiness Project“, and Gottlieb says, “Nowadays, it’s not enough to be happy—if you can be even happier. The American Dream and the pursuit of happiness have morphed from a quest for general contentment to the idea that you must be happy at all times and in every way.”

The best way to summarize Gottlieb’s long piece (12 pages printed) in “The Atlantic” is to quote a few of the experts she mentions. In fact, I boiled about 8,000 words to less than 1,000 and divided that into four parts spread over several days.

In addition, I’ve added videos to support Gottlieb’s message.

We start with Donald Winnicott, the influential English pediatrician and child psychiatrist, who said you don’t have to be a perfect mother to raise a well-adjusted child.

Continued on June 27, 2011 in Too Happy! Too Perfect! Too Fragile! – Part 2

_______________________

Lloyd Lofthouse is a former U.S. Marine and Vietnam Veteran,
who taught in the public schools for thirty years (1975 – 2005).

His third book is Crazy is Normal, a classroom exposé, a memoir. “Lofthouse presents us with grungy classrooms, kids who don’t want to be in school, and the consequences of growing up in a hardscrabble world. While some parents support his efforts, many sabotage them—and isolated administrators make the work of Lofthouse and his peers even more difficult.” – Bruce Reeves

lloydlofthouse_crazyisnormal_web2_5

Lofthouse’s first novel was the award winning historical fiction My Splendid Concubine [3rd edition]. His second novel was the award winning thriller Running with the Enemy. His short story A Night at the “Well of Purity” was named a finalist of the 2007 Chicago Literary Awards. His wife is Anchee Min, the international, best-selling, award winning author of Red Azalea, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year (1992).

To follow this Blog via E-mail see upper right-hand column and click on “Sign me up!”

 
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Posted by on June 26, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting, student behavior

 

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What, Me Worry about Debt! – I’ve got self-esteem protecting me – Part 3/3

21 Jun

What looming disaster has the self-esteem movement created?

Rachel Dwyer of Ohio State University says, “By age 28, those students may be realizing that they overestimated how much money they were going to earn in their jobs. When they took out the loans, they may have thought they would pay off their debts easily, and it is turning out that it is not as easy as they had hoped.”

According to The Smart Student Guide to Financial Aid, these debts range from $10,000 to more than $100,000.  In fact, a total of more than $1.7 trillion in federal education loans have been made since beginning of the loan programs.


Link to the entire program of Your Life, Your Money

In addition, the estimated total private student loans outstanding as of June 30, 2009 were approximately 157.8 billion.  The overall total education loans outstanding, federal and private, was about $763.4 billion in 2009.

When I wrote this post, the Student Loan Debt Clock said that number now stood at more than $900 billion dollars.

If we go back to the beginning of this series of posts, you will recall that many of these young adults also carry credit cards beyond the student loans and undergraduates are carrying record-high credit card balances. Source: Credit Cards.com

The average (mean) balance grew to $3,173, the highest in the years the study has been conducted. Twenty-one percent of undergraduates had balances of between $3,000 and $7,000, also up from the last study.

In addition, close to one-fifth of seniors carried balances greater than $7,000, while the average college graduate has nearly $20,000 in credit card debt. (Source: Sallie Mae, “How Undergraduate Students Use Credit Cards,” April 2009)

The results of this study has revealed that the movement to boost vanity among our children for the last five decades has created a debt crises that many young adults may struggle for decades to pay off while sacrificing a better lifestyle than their parents may have experienced.

Even more disturbing is a piece by Lori Gottlieb in the Atlantic, How to Land Your Kid in Therapy, which deals with why the obsession with our children’s (self-esteem) happiness may be dooming them with unhappy adulthoods. I will write summary of this long article in another post (Gottlieb’s Atlantic piece ran 12 pages printed).

Return to What, Me Worry about Debt! – Part 2 or return to Part 1

______________

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.

 
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Posted by on June 21, 2011 in child abuse, family values, Parenting

 

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What, Me Worry about Debt – I’ve got self-esteem protecting me – Part 2/3

20 Jun

Parents that obsess about his or her child’s self-esteem and do all they could to nurture their child’s vanity led to the average parent in America being a permissive parent.

“Permissive parenting often results in children who rank low in happiness and self-regulation. These children are more likely to experience problems with authority and tend to perform poorly in school.” Source: The Four Styles of Parenting

In fact, if the inability to self-regulate is not adequately developed, the result is increased stress vulnerability and susceptibility to psychopathology, of which depression is one possible outcome leading to unhappiness along with a higher risk of drug and/or alcohol abuse along with higher rates of suicide.

For example—Caucasian teens with the highest rates of self-esteem have almost twice the suicide rate and much higher rates of alcohol and drug use than that of Asian-Americans who, according to studies, have the lowest self-esteem in the US.

Instead of boosting self-esteem, parents should have focused on building confidence through guiding their children to overcome failure by learning to work hard to reach success.

When we learn the definition of self-esteem, we discover that it is respect for or a favorable opinion of oneself and/or an unduly high opinion of oneself that leads to vanity, which means excessive pride in one’s appearance or accomplishments regardless of the facts.

In addition, synonyms for self-esteem are: conceit, self-love, narcacism, egotism, etc.

Self-confidence, on the other hand, is a belief in one’s own abilities and true self-confidence isn’t an overnight acquisition. It takes dedication and time to realize you are a good and capable human being.  It is confidence in one’s own powers, judgment, etc.  It means risking failure to learn how to succeed.

Eventually, an individual with confidence gains freedom from doubt of his or her abilities.

Continued on June 21, 2011 in What, Me Worry about Debt! – Part 3 or return to Part 1

______________

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.

 
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Posted by on June 20, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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What, Me Worry about Debt – I’ve got self-esteem protecting me – Part 1/3

19 Jun

Another byproduct of the Self-esteem follow Your Dream Parenting Movement that started in the 1960s is what Rachel Dwyer, Ohio State University, writes of in What, me worry? Young adults get self-esteem boost from debt.

Dwyer writes of a study involving 3,079 young adults (for 32 years) who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979 – Young Adults sample (NLSY).

The NLSY interviewed the same nationally representative group of Americans every two years, and the survey was conducted by the Ohio State’s Center for Human Resource Research on behalf of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

What researchers discovered was that the more credit card and college-loan debt held by young adults aged 18 to 27, the higher their self-esteem and the more they felt like they were in control of their lives.

The effect was strongest among those in the lowest economic class. The survey reveals that many young people do not understand the mess they are getting themselves into until after age 28.

The results from this survey offers more evidence that self-esteem should not have generated an industry to feed its growth.

When I searched YouTube, I discovered more than a thousand videos on “How to Boost Self-esteem”.

On Amazon, there were 158 results and for Google there were 6,310,000 results.  The first Google hit was a five-step plan from the Mayo Clinic.

In fact, since the “average” America parent has been obsessed with the self-esteem of their children since the 1960s, this resulted in the public schools inflating grades contributing to dumbing down the curriculum.

Continued on June 20 in What, Me Worry about Debt! – Part 2

______________

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.

 
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Posted by on June 19, 2011 in family values, Parenting

 

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The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 7/7

18 Jun

The day I discovered the principal was not going to do anything about Macario, I finished my workday at 6:00 PM and drove to the police station that served the neighborhood where Macario lived, which was a fifteen-minute drive in the opposite direction I would take to go home and the drive home usually took an hour in the afternoon and evening due to rush hour traffic.

When I arrived, the lobby at the police station had several other people already there waiting to talk to the officer working the counter. While I waited, I broke out the red ink and correct student work.

I had to wait a half hour before I could talk to the officer on duty and get the proper forms then spend another thirty to forty minutes filling out the forms, which resulted in a squad car with two officers visiting Macario’s home to question him and his parents then report the incident to child services, who then became involved.

After child services became involved, Macario had more counseling in addition to the school counselor, his mood improved but the joker in teen was gone.  He even started to do the schoolwork in my class and managed to bring his grade up to a “C” or a “B” by the end of second semester.

To do this, he spent more time at Janice’s house doing homework and a few years later he graduated then I lost contact with him and Janice never hearing from them again.

Moreover, Macario was one of about 6,000 students that I taught during my thirty years in the classroom. I have hundreds of stories similar to this one but not about sexual abuse.

According to studies, one in six men has been sexually assaulted by the age of 16. Source: Sexual Abuse of Males

Return to The Sexual Molestation of the Happy One – Part 6 or start with Part 1

______________

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.

 
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Posted by on June 18, 2011 in American Public Schools, child abuse, family values, Parenting, Public School, student behavior, Teaching

 

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