Janice told me that Macario’s parents both worked and were out of the house before he left to school.
She said the only reason he ate a good breakfast was that she made him eat something like a banana, an egg and a piece of toast when he arrived at her house to walk her to campus each morning.
Janice was not only Macario’s best friend and lover, she was also more of a mother to him than his mother was.
The story she told me was that while he was still in the shower that morning, two strange men broke into the house and tried to rape him.
They came into the bathroom and dragged him out of the shower. He fought and said he managed to break free, but his eyes darted away again as he answered my questions about what happened after the men dragged him from the shower.
He claimed he fought his way free, grabbed some clothes and escaped from the house and hurried to meet Janice on the way to school where he told her what happened to him.
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.
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Macario was a talker and loved to be funny and get people to laugh, which wasn’t always welcome when it disrupted a lesson.
However, I must admit, even when Macario interrupted a lesson with one of his off-the-wall jokes or comments, I often laughed too. It was impossible not to like him.
Then, as he often did after he cracked the entire class up, he would apologize.
Janice, on the other hand, was an “A” student that enjoyed reading books and was as determined as I was to motivate Macario to do the school work and study.
I conspired with Janice to find ways to trick him into doing his homework, which even for the young girl that loved him was a challenge. He was more into having fun than being serious about anything.
Some might wonder why I didn’t contact his parents. In fact, I had called them several times over the months and even had a face-to-face parent conference, but his study habits did not change. I tried referrals to the counselor, and assigned after school detentions and even a Saturday school. Nothing worked
That is when I made the decision to see if Janice could help.
Between us, Janice and I managed to squeeze a “D” out of Macario in English his first semester in high school. Without her efforts, he would have failed.
To make a long story shorter but not too short, I kept Macario after class that day and asked him what was wrong. He swore nothing was wrong but I could tell by the look in his eyes that he was disturbed and had lied to me because he glanced away to stare at the floor when he answered the question.
This was unusual since Macario had never lied to me. When confronted for something I saw him do in class, he always admitted guilt and said he was sorry (once again).
However, when Janice came into fifth period after lunch, I asked her what was going on and she told me everything she knew.
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.
Since I don’t remember the student’s name and will not spend the time to search my files to find it, I will call him Macario because he was a happy boy of 14 when I knew him.
Macario was in my fourth period class before lunch and he wasn’t a good student and seldom did his work but he was a good person and someone easy to like and almost impossible to get angry at.
I also knew his girlfriend, who I will call Janice, since she was in my fifth period class after lunch. The couple often came to my class at lunch when my high school journalism students were working. The chess club also met there to play chess and the high school environmental club met there once a month to plan hikes and projects.
One would think that spending lunch with friends outside would be preferable to a teen.
If you knew the high school where I taught and the gang culture that dominated it, it made sense that good kids would want to find a sanctuary from the potential violence. The gang culture then was large enough that it brought an armed sheriff’s deputy to campus daily, who sat in his squad car in the mall where most of the kids ate lunch and where all the gang bangers could see that shotgun attached to the dash.
The high school also had an unarmed squad of campus police officers.
However, getting Macario to read or do homework was a challenge and 75% of the way through the school year, I wasn’t having much success beyond the minimum necessary to keep his girlfriend from leaving him.
Macario wasn’t interested in school work or reading books, but he was always in a good mood and happy, which is what made me suspicious something happened the one morning he came to class early and with a dazed, disturbed look on his face and didn’t say a word all period.
To go an entire period without attempting to get others to laugh was not Macario. At first, I thought he may have broken up with Janice, or a family member died or maybe his parents had separated and were going to get a divorce. I had no idea that Macario had been sexually molested.
That day Macario and Janice did not show up for lunch.
When Janice came to fifth, I asked if she’d had an argument with Macario or had broken up with him.
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.
It’s strange what triggers a memory. This memory should have been triggered when my wife and I were watching the Oprah show on November 5, 2010, where she had 200 adult men in her audience that had been sexually molested as children.
As millions know, Oprah was abused as a child and is seriously passionate about the awareness of sexual child abuse.
What triggered this memory was a series of stories such as Anthony Weiner‘s inappropriate Twitter exchanges with a 17-year old girl and French writer Tristane Banon, who refuses to testify in the Strauss-Khan U.S. sexual molestation case.
At this point, you may be thinking that this is about me being sexually molested as a child but no, that is not the story.
This “true” story is about a ninth grade student of mine while I was still teaching high school English.
Since I wrote many of my reports on a computer and kept them on a USB drive, I probably still have this report and the name of the boy that was molested stored away somewhere in a file, but I doubt if I would ever find it since that CPU is now on a shelf and has been replaced by a series of newer, faster computers over the years.
California has a law that mandates educators must report suspected child abuse or the educator (including teachers) may lose his or her job and never work in education in California again.
In California “child abuse” refers to physical abuse, neglect, sexual abuse, and severe emotional abuse. The pdf. document to educate educators and/or teachers is 85 pages long and comes with a test. Source: Mandated Reporter Ca.com
If you are curious what this training entails, click on the above link and discover the training I had one year. We may not have used this exact manual, but we had one and spent several hours in a workshop learning what to do and what happened if we didn’t do anything.
The penalties for failure to report are severe. “A person who fails to make a required report is guilty of misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and/or up to a $1,000 fine.… Educators who fail to report may also risk loss of their license or credential,” which means losing your job as an educator/teacher.
During my 30 years as a teacher, I filed one report. It was the only time that I suspected that one of my students had been sexually molested.
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.
What is the risk of mental and/or physical damage by spending too much time on the Internet or from cell phone use?
According to a recent poll, 22% of teenagers log on to their favorite social media site more than 10 timesa day, and more than half of adolescents log on to a social media site more than once a day.
Seventy-five percent of teenagers now own cell phones (In 2010, there were 33.5 million teens in the US, which means more than 25 million may be at risk for brain cancer in the future.), and 25% use them for social media, 54% use them for texting, and 24% use them for instant messaging.
Thus, a large part of this generation’s social and emotional development is occurring while on the Internet and on cell phones.
In fact, according to eMarketer, “Teens live, eat, sleep and breathe the internet. More than 95% are using the internet in 2011.”
We also know from parenting studies that self-esteem and/or permissive parenting is more prevalent among Caucasian parents in the US than Asian-American parents and comparing the suicide and mental illness rates among teens in these two groups reveals a shocking truth.
Suicide is the third leading cause of death of young persons aged 15-24 and according to Child Trends Databank, among males, suicide rates in 2003 were 13.3 per 100,000 for Caucasians but only 6.7 per 100,000 for Asian- Americans.
For females, the rate of suicide among Caucasians was 3.0 per 100,000 while the Asian-American female suicide rate was 2.5 per 100,000. Source: Teen Help.com
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.
The permissive Self-esteem and Montessori approaches to raising children both encourage children to make many of their own decisions while adults/parents stay mostly out of the way. Without more involved parental/adult guidance, the long-term results may be devastating.
However, before you side with the critics to justify spending more time online, stop and think about the higher risk of cancer that was linked to cell phone use, which was also criticized when it was first reported as a theory.
Then recently alarming new research from Sweden on the effects of radiation from cell phone use indicates that children and teenagers are five times more likely to get brain cancer from the use of mobile phones. Source: The Independent
As for “Facebook depression”, the advice said parents should understand the sites their children visit and encourage healthy use and should monitor for potential problems such as cyberbullying, “Facebook depression,” sexting, and exposure to inappropriate content.
Being popular and fitting in is the thing for every teen across the globe. Peer pressure is intense (and cyberbullying is quite common, can occur to any young person online, and can cause profound psychosocial outcomes including depression, anxiety, severe isolation, and,tragically, suicide.) and has an impact on many undesirable choices that many teenagers are making – whether or not to smoke, drink, have sex, attend school, indulge in criminal/antisocial behaviour.
The study concluded that, “As with offline depression, preadolescents and adolescents who suffer from Facebook depression are at risk for social isolation and sometimes turn to risky Internet sites and blogs for “help” that may promote substance abuse, unsafe sexual practices, or aggressive or self-destructive behaviors.”
The risk of cancer from cell phone use and more on depression will be covered in parts 2 and 3 of this series.
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.
After reading an insulting review titled Fascist Crap on Amazon, which was an ignorant, intollerant rant and an example of individuals that do not have the ability to accept anyone that is different from him or her, I decided to write this post.
The reaction was from an anonymous reviewer that calls herself Danielle Cara, which defines most if not all of Amy Chua’s critics. Amy Chua is the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, which was on the New York Times Bestseller List for about 20 weeks after its release January 11, 2011.
Why Do Parenting Styles Differ? by Kandra Cherry, who holds a Bachelor of Science in Psychology from Idaho State University, with additional coursework in chemical addictions and case management. She also holds a Master of Science in Education from Boise State University. Her primary research interest is in educational psychology.
Kandra Cherry writes, “After learning about the impact of parenting styles on child development, you may wonder why all parents simply don’t utilize an authoritative parenting style. After all, this parenting style is the most likely to produce happy, confident and capable children. What are some reasons why parenting styles might vary? Some potential causes of these differences include culture, personality, family size, parental background, socioeconomic status, educational level and religion.
“Of course, the parenting styles of individual parents also combine to create a unique blend in each and every family. For example, the mother may display an authoritative style while the father favors a more permissive approach. In order to create a cohesive approach to parenting, it is essential that parents learn to cooperate as they combine various elements of their unique parenting styles.”
Then there is what Amy Chua had to say about how she was raised and how that influenced her as a parent.
Amy Chua writes, “I was raised by very strict, Chinese immigrant parents, who came to the U.S. as graduate students with practically no money. My mother and father were so poor they couldn’t afford heat their first two winters in Boston, and wore blankets around to keep warm. As parents, they demanded total respect and were very tough with my three younger sisters and me. We got in trouble for A minuses, had to drill math and piano every day, no sleepovers, no boyfriends. But the strategy worked with me. To this day, I’m very close to my parents, and I feel I owe them everything. In fact, I believe that my parents having high expectations for me – coupled with love – is the greatest gift anyone has ever given me. That’s why I tried to raise my own two daughters the same way my parents raised me.”
Then in 2006, CBS News reported, Do Montessori Schools Have An Edge? In the CBS report, Debra Ackerman, Ph.D., of the privately funded National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER), tells WebMD that no single teaching method or curriculum, including Montessori, has been proven to be the best approach for teaching young children.
There are many widely differing approaches to early education, Ackerman says, and the large-scale studies needed to better understand which methods work best are just starting to be done.
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
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).
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Steve Fisher writes in the Costco Connection, “Alan Page was a defensive tackle for the Minnesota Vikings and the Chicago Bears. During the off-season, Page studied law and in 1992 was elected the first African American associate justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court. Page was inducted into the Pro-Football Hall of Fame in 1988.”
Alan Page says, “My parents knew and understood the value and importance of education and they instilled that in me. And for young people who don’t value education as much as they could or as they should, it seems to me that trying to change that focus benefits them a great deal but also benefits all of us in society a great idea.”
Edgar Martinez says, “If you don’t’ have access to an equitable education, the chances you have in life aren’t equitable either.” Martinez played for the Seattle Mariners and many fans credit him for saving baseball in Seattle.
Both Alan Page and Edgar Martinez are right, which is why students must have the importance of education instilled in them at an early age and the best people to do that are the parents.
While earning my teaching credential, I learned that 90% of a child’s development forms before starting kindergarten.
In fact, prenatal care and the quality of life experienced in the early years from birth to the first six years affect physical and brain development of children, and lay the foundation for cognitive and socio-emotional development in subsequent stages of their lives.
“Early childhood experience has a great impact on the development of one’s intelligence, character and social behavior. If the window of opportunity is missed during early childhood, it would be much costlier and harder to build a successful life later,” said Dr. Zhao Baige, Vice Minister of the National Population and Family Planning Commission. Source: The World Bank
After learning more of the facts, what is leading the assault on public education and teachers? One answer may be the $533 billion dollars of annual taxpayer money that funds the public schools, which could be used to generate profits for a shaky private sector that feeds on economic growth.
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
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!”
I have more to share from the Costco Connection. This time it is the Cover Story by Steve Fisher in the May 2011 issue, about pro-active professional athletes making a positive impact for individuals and education proving once again if the will is there, students will learn and succeed.
I must have taught more than 6,000 students during the thirty years I was in the classroom, and it is a fact that in every class there were willing students that wanted to learn and did. The students that earned A’s, B’s and C’s were not the exception—they just applied themselves.
What made the difference in students that listened, read, asked questions, took part in discussions and worked was someone that instilled at an early age the importance of an education.
Unfortunately, students that disrupted the learning environment and/or did not study or do the work outnumbered those that cooperated.
However, according to many American politicos and even US Presidents, failures in the American public education system is due to bad teaching.
In fact, the real reason is that there are about three million public school teachers in the US compared to more than sixty million parents. Why tell the truth and lose the votes of parents, which outnumber the votes of teachers?
When I Googled “How many bad teachers are there?” 45 million hits came back. Most that I looked at were opinions, but I discovered the results from one reputable study that said, “fewer than 1% of teachers are rated unsatisfactory”. Source: Ed Policy Thoughts.com
I then learned there are about 3.2 million public school teachers in the US (K to 12), which means about 32,000 teachers are doing an unsatisfactory job with more than three million doing a good job with students that cooperate.
If a few bad teachers are the problem, whom do we give credit to for the successes? Alan Page, Edgar Martinez, or Oprah Winfrey are a few besides the more than 3 million public school teachers doing an adequate or outstanding job with students that cooperate.
I will share more about what I learned from the Costco Connection in addition to what I have learned Oprah Winfrey has done for education in 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
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!”
As you may have learned in Part One and Part Two, Old-World parenting was an improvement over the way children grew up before the 18th century and the Chinese may have learned this parenting method from the invading Western nations after The Opium Wars.
However, parenting methods developed further and by the 1960s, according to research, the best method of parenting is not Authoritarian but Authoritative, which is characterized by moderate demands with moderate responsiveness.
The authoritative parent is firm but not rigid, willing to make an exception when the situation warrants. The authoritative parent is responsive to the child’s needs but not indulgent. Baumrind makes it clear that she favors the authoritative style.
The worst parenting style represents what studies show are the “average” child and parent in the United States today. These parents are Permissive, Uninvolved or a combination of both.
Since the average parent in the US today talks to his or her child less than five minutes a day and the average child spends more than 10 hours a day dividing his or her time up between watching TV, playing video games, social networking on sites such as Facebook, or sending hundreds of text messages monthly, it is obvious what the results are. Source: Media Literacy Clearinghouse
Since the Permissive and/or Uninvolved parent has few requirements for mature behavior, children may lack skills in social settings. While they may be good at interpersonal communication, they lack other important skills such as sharing. The child may also fear becoming dependent on other people, are often emotionally withdrawn, tend to exhibit more delinquency during adolescence, feels fear and anxiety or stress due to lack of family support and had an increased risk of substance abuse.
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
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!”
Crazy Normal - the Classroom Exposé 