Last spring, Edline sent a notification about my
stepkid's Biology grade. For those not familiar with Edline, it's utilized by
schools to host their internal websites, student records and staff contact
information. Emails from Edline come in every few days — primarily with updates
on grades so that parents can track a child's progress over the course of the
school year. It feels sometimes like an unwelcome shove into hovering parent
mode. Other times it's a useful tool — like when my husband, Michael, and I
were virtually informed that his son hadn't turned in his Biology homework
for a month.
"Looks
like you haven't turned in your Biology homework for a month?" I said.
"Ayuhuh."
(Translation: Ayah, sometimes pronounced "Mmnnm.")
"So,
you haven't turned in your Biology homework for a month?"
"I
guess."
"What's
up with that?"
"Mmnnm."
(Translation: I don't know)
When
someone answers "I don't know," but does, but isn't in the mood
to talk, or to deal with the issue at hand, I get ... testy. Throw me a bone,
already.
("I
don't know," of course,
can be a powerful, liberating statement — for 16 year olds and everyone else —
a demonstration of humility, and the confidence to display a lack of knowledge alongside
the desire to acquire it. As a lifelong know-it-all — even/especially when I
didn't — this has been a revelation in the past few years. I actually kind of
get off on it. Just yesterday, my manager in my new-ish role at work referred
to the Something or Other Special Report. "I don't know what that
is," I said. I swear I had a little dopamine pleasure surge. When I catch
myself opining on something I know absolutely nothing about, I will cut myself
off, with a motto adopted from an old colleague [who, in fact, knew more than a
little about almost everything]: "Often wrong, never in doubt!")
"Can
we talk about this in 15 minutes (or tomorrow, or never)?" would be a fine
response. And is rarely the response I get, despite years of modeling,
suggesting, and asking for this. So, I get the opportunity to remind
myself that the brain of a 16-year-old boy looks something like this:
And, since I know that neither polite inquiry nor
relentless nagging can be processed by said brain, I employed a new tactic:
"Since
the only thing I've liked less in my life than nagging you about your homework
was doing homework, can we bypass the bullshit here?"
Lip
twitch (Translation: smile)
"Why
aren't you doing it?"
"I
forgot."
"Huh.
As far as I can tell, you have an excellent memory. Do you mean 'Homework is
stupid busywork and I'd rather stab myself in the eye than do it after sitting
in school all day and then kicking ass at wrestling practice for three hours'?"
"Yeah,
something like that."
That
right there? That was big for us! Because somewhere along the parenting line,
step- or otherwise, I'd forgotten that basically all a kid needs (besides housing
and benzoyl peroxide) is to be heard, and to be understood. Or, for there to be
a willingness to understand, so they will hopefully talk, and thereby be heard.
Most
often what they need is for adults to shut the heck up. My go-to in this
department is Vicki Hoefle of Parenting On Track, and the
author of Duct-Tape Parenting.
Some of her suggestions are too radical for me — not that I doubt they'd work;
I'm just not evolved enough to employ them — but the basic premise that 1)
training one's kids for self-sufficiency from Day One and 2) putting in the
time and mindfulness for a fun and trusting relationship naturally result
in cooperation, familial connection and respect. Managing, micronagging, and keeping
under surveillance, on the other hand, don't exactly engender an open and
communicative relationship. Hoefle asserts that when there are problems with
kids, they're either due to breakdowns of relationships or lack of training.
(The duct tape is for us, not them)
I suspect this homework thing is a training
issue, despite the hours and evenings logged over the years. He knows how to do
his homework, but does he know when and where to do it, aside from while
cross-eyed tired at night, or during a 45-minute study hall? And, do we
really know if he knows how to do it? He was an honors student until two years
ago, then had a slight-but-not-red-flag-raising dip in his grades that could be
chalked up to the difference in academic challenge — and hormonal distractions,
and heavier sports schedules — from middle to high school.
He had always brought home report cards with smiley-face-accented
comments written in the margins, and we were lax about checking his homework or
appraising his time management methods, because it seemed that whatever he was
doing was working for him, until it didn't, in the form of Cs and Ds.
Also,
he came to live with us when he was 9, and while I was the grown-up most game
to do so — his dad has a PTSD response to math worksheets and the smell of
chalk, having been sufficiently shamed by the nuns for what was likely dyslexia
— I didn't feel comfortable, at all, jumping into classroom-parent mode. His
mom was suddenly, temporarily out of the picture, our living arrangement a few
months' out was a big unknown, and my aim was to covertly do the parenting
stuff necessary while maintaining lady-friend-who-happens-to-live-with-your-dad
status.
My
involvement with his education prior to that was one incident, the weekend
before he entered fourth grade. I asked if he had summer reading. I was working
at a magazine for K-8 educators at the time, so I had elementary school
curricula on the brain. Plus, we'd tentatively connected by reading together
the four nights a month he spent at his father's. I was hyperconscious of not
treading into the mom realm, but as they didn't have a read-aloud routine, I
felt comfortable bringing on the kid lit, with a wall of review copies at work
to choose from. He had never gotten his summer reading book. As we drove to the
library, I had to chew my cheek to prevent uncharitable thoughts from slipping
out in spoken form, and to remind myself that it was unfair to judge someone
else's oversights when I only had one life, my own, to keep track of at that
point. He picked out Sideways
Stories from Wayside School by
Louis Sachar, and applied for his first library card. It was my first
experience feeling parent-y with him. It was thrilling, and complicated. It
would get way more complicated, then necessary, then easier, but never easy, to
determine when I needed to parent, and when I needed to leave it to the people
on his birth certificate.
I
wish I'd owned the academic arena with him more, and sooner. It's clearer cut
now. He'll be the first in his family to go to college, and I'm the de facto
docent on that journey. Come to think of it, while both my parents have their
BAs and beyond, my stepmother brought me to visit a college campus or two, and
she was the one who suggested I just might love my now-alma mater, a school I
never thought I'd get into, never mind be able to afford (the higher the ivy,
the deeper the pockets, as it turned out).
So,
homework: "I get it," I said. "The problem is that it affects
your grade, and grades affect your grade point average, and colleges care about
those things. So, if you want to have more choices about where you go to
college, you have to do your homework." As I said all of this, I felt
deeply tired, and wanted to pack up all our crap, buy one of those little
trailer campers, head to South America and call it home schooling, which
Michael and I have seriously contemplated, if only the other parent in the
picture would go along with it (not literally, since those campers comfortably
sleep about one petite person and a napping cat, and she has myriad small
children and a Winnebago-sized personality).
Then
I had a radical and unthinkable thought. What if he's a morning person, but
doesn't know it? I realized about a year ago, only out of a desperate attempt
to find quiet, uninterrupted time in my day, that I work better early in the
day than late at night. Really early, like 5 a.m. Maybe it's a new
development borne of being forced awake by small people around the hour I used
to go to bed in the old days. Or maybe it's always been the case, and
unfortunately I didn't know it in high school or college, or in all my
years as a freelancer.
Indeed,
he didn't look impressed with my theory. I said I'd wake him up, and would make
him breakfast,* if he was willing to try it for a week. Since his bus comes at the
obscene time of 7:07 a.m., this meant 5 or 5:30 a.m.
This
is rather counterintuitive, considering teens'
night-owl circadian rhythms. Which was clearly not considered by whatever
geniuses in education decided it made sense for those humans most biologically
prone to staying up til midnight to start their academic day while it's still
dark out four months of the year. Our kindergartner is up, dressed and ready to
party on the playground by 6:30 a.m., and her school day doesn't begin til
8:55. This schedule had to have been built around bus/traffic logistics, or to
accommodate high school athletics — because field hockey is critical to academic
competitiveness for the 21st century, and football is a viable career path.
Anyway,
he agreed. (!?) It wasn't a fix-all, but he did most of his homework for the
rest of the year. His grades did go up, and he consistently ate breakfast for a
change (which no doubt helped, as well).
So,
here we are, at the beginning of 11th grade — the PSAT this fall, the SAT and
ACT in the spring, college visits, the make-or-break year for hiking up that
GPA. At this point, a few weeks in, he's entirely unwilling to get up before 28
minutes before his bus.** Edline is now Infinite Campus — an even more Big
Parent-like name. I have resisted checking his grades online so far. His dad
and I recently asked how it's going, and are told, "All right, I
guess," which could mean he's in the front row with his No. 2 pencil and
graphing calculator, or sitting behind the tall kid, texting under his
textbook. But he wants to, and expects to, go to college. He said, "I
averaged my GPA in with the possible best grades I can get, and I don't think I
can get it to a 3.5." (Translation: I'm concerned. I'm disappointed. I
might go into "I don't give a fuck, self-protection mode" in about 30
seconds if you don't say something hopeful.) I opened my mouth and urged
something smart to come out. "That's good, to know what you're working
with. Colleges look for improvement, though, and give a lot of weight to test
scores and application essays, too. What can you do to be certain about that
GPA average?" He said he'd check with his guidance counselor. I pulled up
a U.S. News and World Report article, optimistically titled "A+
Schools for B Students." I watched his face loosen up a bit. Hope,
restored. What I didn't say at this juncture is that community colleges are an
excellent starter option, and may end up being the most strategic way to afford
his higher education. Part of parenting is holding high expectations for your
kids, so they can think big, but how to do that without Big Parenting? There
should be a night course on the subject. Or an early-morning one.
—————————
*Another
Vicki Hoefle gem is that our job and responsibility as parents is to train up,
relate closely to, and back off from our kids, so they can sail out the door at
18, confident, self-sufficient, and able to cook their own dinner — and will
want to come back for visits, versus feeling compelled to flee our familial
clutches and be basically MIA for the next decade. While we neglected to spot
the time-management issue for a while there, the stepkid has done his laundry
since he was 10, puts his lunch together if he wants to brown bag it, and
theoretically knows how to make a bed. And he certainly can boil up a bowl of
oatmeal. But I know I certainly appreciate having breakfast made for me
sometimes. There's an importance balance between fostering independence, and
easing another's burden because that's just a nice thing to do, and to teach,
in a family.
**Breaking
news: At 6:50 this morning, he asked for a ride. His Algebra teacher offers
extra help before school, running through practice questions on test/quiz days.
Just now he texted us that he got a 98.8%. (After a futile attempt to ban
electronic devices, his school has an amorphous policy where students can use
them — to listen to music or to look something up online — or not, at each
teacher's discretion. He had to leave his at home for most of last year after
being caught texting when not allowed — in Biology).