Cindy and I have been working on our Children Write the Future site for a really… er, REALLY long time now. Setback after setback, it’s sat in our lab, patiently waiting for the time when it could have the attention it so deserves.

One of our biggest desires is to build a high-quality online home where young writers and their parents can comfortably gather.

Starting this coming Monday, Children Write the Future will publish a continuously evolving stream of content, five days a week. However, we both believe it is often easiest to learn with consistency in place.

For the time being, the Children Write the Future schedule is as follows.

• Monday: We will start each week with writing tips for young and emerging writers that will both encourage them to become their best writers while also giving them the tools they need to make their writing as sharp as it can be.
• Tuesday: A writing prompt will be given each week to get those creative juices flowing.
• Wednesday: On Wednesday’s, Cindy and I will write a post together, discussing the most common roadblocks to writing, simple solutions, best practices and emerging trends.
• Thursday: Our 7 year old daughter Mia is going to be publishing her work each Thursday, along with the occasional guest post from another child. There are also whispers that Lucas Bright may make an appearance or two.
• Friday: A serialized excerpt from an upcoming book. Our first selection is, Penny to a Million, my first chapter book going to print, and a topic I’ll be talking a lot more about shortly.

We’ve also decided to gather each week’s information and publish it in a weekly newsletter, in an easy to digest format delivered directly to our subscriber’s inbox. It is 100% free and sent out each Friday.

You can sign up for the newsletter below right now. Otherwise, we’d love to see you at the site next Monday!

Have you ever heard a song, watched a movie or read something remarkable and thought, “Man, I wish I had thought of that.” Kidpreneurs, by Adam and Matthew Toren is the children’s book I have wanted to write since before I was a writer, except it’s exponentially better than anything I ever would have done.

I started writing two years ago because I wanted to write for children, and one of the subjects I most wanted to write about was money. Longtime readers might remember The Eighth Wonder of the World, my first public attempt at writing about money for children.

Cindy and I do our best to teach Mia and Max about money, and always explain our monetary exchanges whenever appropriate. To me this seems natural. A basic understanding of money should be given to children at the earliest possible age, as fundamental understanding is essential to monetary success. It is difficult for me to understand why there are so few books that teach children about the relationship between money and daily decisions. After all, it is one of the most important things we will ever learn.

Kidpreneurs does everything I ever imagined a high quality children’s book about money would do, then takes it several steps further. Adam and Matthew are serial entrepreneurs and founders of YoungEntrepreneur.com. They believe in the power of youth and have written a book encouraging children to harness their natural curiosity and internal drive in order to set the stage for limitless potential that can last the rest of their lives.

What’s not to love about this book? Kidpreneurs presents the practicalities of how a business works, while also asking an essential life question at an early age: When you grow up, do you want to be your own boss or do you want to work for somebody else?

Through the use of entertaining dialogue and adorable cartoon people, Adam and Matthew guide the reader through a series of intelligent decisions, each one building on the last and constantly reinforcing the idea that time and effort have value. The pages are friendly and colorful with a mixture of wonderful drawings and text that is both intelligent and succinct. The copy is straightforward, but there is also an enormous amount communicated through the pictures.

Kidpreneurs is a book that can be equally enjoyed by parents and children.

One of my favorite things about Kidpreneurs comes about midway through the book with the introduction of several sample businesses that any young reader could start. These businesses are charming by themselves, but what is most impressive is that each sample business also includes a completed outline, allowing a child to not only see what it takes to run that particular business, but helping them to generate ideas for other future businesses as well.

Each sample business asks the following questions:

• What we do
• Hours available
• Target customers
• Startup costs
• Selling points
• Advertising needed

Sample businesses include babysitting, lawn care, lemonade stand (classic!), dog walking, window washing, errand services and a virtual assistant. Each business plan is well laid out with step-by-step examples which show that these business are easily attainable for most children.

Chapters also conclude with self-assessment quizzes which are cheeky, fun and a terrific way to have an audience of young readers monitor their comprehension.

One final thing of note is that Kidpreneurs genuinely approaches the needs of a 21st century learner, by helping them to understand the essential skills of tomorrow, such as how to build a simple website and the basics of networking.

Not only is Kidpreneurs the book I would have loved to read as a kid and the book I would have loved to have written as an adult, it is the book I’m eager to share with my children. Click here to go to the Kidpreneurs website.

Writer Dad

I’ve entered a contest where the winner gets a six month gig blogging about happiness. I would LOVE to land this gig. Voting takes less than five seconds and you can vote once per day. Click here to cast your vote. THANKS!

~Lewis Carroll

Sorry.

This is my second feisty post in a week. Fortunately for my other sites, and unlike last week’s Kanye rant, I’ll keep this particular bit of self bluster contained to a single domain.

This is the first personal rant I’ve published and I will not be using any names. However, there are some things I’ve just gotta get out and I would like these thoughts to go somewhere more lasting than MacJournal. Since you’ve always been rather patient with me (thanks for that) I figure this is as good a place as any. So um…thanks.

Here we go.

At the end of last school year, Cindy hesitantly assumed the position of Vice President at our school’s PTA for the 2009-2010 calendar year. I admit, though I am of course supportive of our school and was appreciative of the nomination, I wasn’t thrilled with the demands it would inevitably place on our schedule. Though I knew she would approach the position with her usual enthusiasm and tireless effort, I wasn’t too keen on the commitment in the first place, considering the piles currently on our plate and the thirty minute commute to the school which lies in both directions.

Cindy has been teaching for twenty years and has coordinated national conferences for our nation’s most respected leaders in education, including a literacy conference in Washington DC that had a component designed specifically for best methods to reach members of the PTA. She has been intimately involved with a dozen different PTA’s across the nation (from posh neighborhoods with fences around the trees rather than the campus, to an overcrowded school sandwiched between a duet of crack houses). One would imagine she carried the qualifications necessary to sit on the board of a small school with a student body totaling less than 500 students.

But no.

Unfortunately, this particular PTA shares the elements of a trashy TV network pilot that wouldn’t have a chance of getting to air due to its overabundance of unimaginative cliches. You know, duplicity, sabotage and general bad behavior; the sort of stuff adults get away with all too often, but that any reasonable parent would sever with a series of swift consequences.

Cindy, who tells me everything from the things that make her shake in her sleep to when I am wearing a cowlick I can’t see, has kept the majority of this most recent malignant blather from me, probably because she doesn’t want my fingers to go off and do something like what they’re doing right now.

I’ve lived with Cindy for a dozen years, and know when she’s deeply hurting, yet trying to muscle her way through a week without crying. I would have figured it out anyhow, but the few emails that filtered into our general family inbox rather than directly to her private account have told me a story that is sad, altogether disappointing, and rather indicative of the many things that are wrong with our current state of education.

“Let’s have a rummage sale!”

That’s the idea suggested by Cindy and shot down four times last year by an old guard more interested in circles of endless squabble than stepping into any forward momentum. Finally, in the middle of July, after the school year was over, a previous member of the board suggested the brilliant brainstorm herself.

All in favor say, “Aye.”

It was a great suggestion and Cindy took the ball and ran with it. In the first twelve days of the school year she has logged in 80 hours of work, all from behind the decaying walls of small minded behavior. She is not alone. Her hours have transmitted their toil to our children and household in general. In itself this is fine, as every family should do all they can to make their school the best that it can be.

Cindy fell to sleep on Saturday morning at 1:30 in the morning and woke up three hours later to set up the sale.

The rummage sale was a success, generating a tidy sum of money to a PTA budget that is presently on red alert. To say her efforts were not appreciated would be untrue. The principal of the school, the president of the PTA, every teacher who has opened their mouth in Cindy’s direction, and more wonderful parents than we can count, have all been responsive in all the right ways: encouraging, grateful and above all congenial.

But you know what they say about the rotten ones spoiling the whole barrel, right?

Perhaps this is one of the reasons education in our country is walking with a limp in both legs. I’d always assumed it was a score of other things mostly mired in miles of red tape, but if this is how parent volunteers are behaving on campuses across the country, it’s no wonder we’re waist deep in you know what.

I know this sort of rant is uncharacteristic, but I will sleep better tonight for getting it on the page.

To all the many families at the rummage sale on Saturday, thank you so much for inflating the day with your wonderful spirit. It was an awesome community event and a terrific time was had by all. I enjoyed bonding with my fellow parents and was immeasurably proud of the work that our family, alongside so many others, were able to contribute to the strength of our school.

To anyone reading this who shares a school setting with my family, who has a question or concern about anything I have said, I am always open to dialogue. You may email me or give me a call at any time.

To anyone reading this who takes particular umbrage with anything I’ve said today, you probably owe my wife an apology.

To Cindy, please don’t be mad at me, baby. I don’t serve the board, I don’t work for the school, and someday I want our children to know that when it came time, I said what needed saying. I could not be more proud of the effort you have given or the manners you have displayed. I admire your silent strength and unwillingness to discuss the toxicity all around you anywhere near campus. I would not have been able to do the same. I love you.

Writer Dad

Children do learn as they live, but so do adults.  Mia is in a Dual Immersion Spanish program.  She is finishing her first trimester as a first grader or “grader” as she likes to refer to herself now that she is not in kindergarten anymore.  Max starts kindergarten next fall and Mia is taking advantage of all the moments of not having to share the playground with her baby brother.

Max is gifted with as much language as she, except he cannot do it in Spanish….yet (though he nailed potty training in about an hour).  Neither can Mommy, though I am doing everything I can to keep pace.  I tell myself daily  “You can do better. Just jump into conversation with the other moms and dads at pick up time, and speak a little social Spanish.”

I am quiet at pick up time.  I listen and observe.  I am learning.  I am in the silent phase of acquiring language.

Stage 1: Listening.

If you enter Mia’s immersion classroom, the vehicle driving instruction is LANGUAGE.  No, not conjugating verbs or memorizing prepared meaningless dialogue.  Rather, one would see children using Spanish by speaking, reading, writing, adding, discussing fractions, measurement, conducting science experiments, arguing, singing, whispering – every bit in Spanish.

This of course is directed by the guidance of a teacher who follows the same curricula as the district’s English only classrooms, but she gives Mia a gift that I cannot – the mother tongue of Spanish with perfect delivery and high expectations.

We wanted this program for Mia, longed for it and cried when we did not get accepted during the first round of school of choice applications.  Mia is able to maintain English and absorb a second tongue while her brain is most receptive to learning language.  Her academic and social gains, across cultural, ethnic and linguistic boundaries are some of the most positive public education experiences I have been a part of in 20 years of teaching.

It is also the hardest and most challenging endeavor for me.

For Writer Dad and Mia, speaking Spanish is like taking a breath of fresh air.  They skip rope with Spanish like we all skip rope with English.  For me, speaking Spanish is like white knuckling the edge of the North rim of the Grand Canyon before dropping into the deep depths of the wild unknown.

This is a recent homework assignment which Mia attacked with enthusiastic speed, proficiently giving it her all, and finishing with the pride and detail that is our family’s trademark.

Estimados Padres,

Por favor ayuden a su hijo/a a escribir un parafo con 5 o mas oraciones acerca de las jirafas.  Adentro de su folder encontraran intomacion importante acercad de las jirafas que aprendimos en clase.  Nota:  Esta tarea los va preparar para el ecamen de escritura del Miercoles.

Gracias,

Senora Alaniz

Translation:

Dear Parents,
Please have your child write a paragraph with 5 or more sentences about giraffes.  Inside his/her homework folder you will find some important facts they have learned about giraffes.  Note:  This homework will prepare them for their writing test on Wednesday.

The light at the end of the tunnel was a note Mia had written to me after our last homework session.  I found it written on red paper (my favorite color) and in her best first grade penmanship rolled up like a scroll tied in white ribbon.  It said: 

Dear Mommy,  You are the best Mom.  You try so hard and you are smart.  Don’t give up, keep on trying because you are the best.  I love you so so so sooooooo much. Thank you for helping me. xoxo Mia

If wouldn’t make you weep I don’t know what would.  Her words of encouragement made me hold tighter and try harder this weekend when we had to plot out a weather pictograph and write a paragraph about it.  I want to be able to skip rope with Mia and Writer Dad in Spanish.  Max and I are ready, and guess what?

Max is also left handed.

I can add writing with my left hand to model for my son, so I can both feel and understand the difficulty of writing with my least dominant hand, then add it to my to do list under master Spanish.  It takes time, but that is the best gift I have to give my children.

Here is Mia’s exam on Giraffes.  She received a score of a “4″  which in Dual Immersion Land means advanced proficient.

Las Jirafas

Las jirafas son mamiferos.  Tienen crias cuidan a sus crias las crias toman leche de su mama y tambien tienen cuellos muy largos, manchas cafes, y colas muy largos.  Viven en la savana de Africa.  Comen hojas verdes de los arbols y palitos.  Algo de sus adapsienes son: manchas, cafes para camuflajearse, cuellos my largos para ver cuando sus en emigos van a atakar y duermen a dos horas por dia.  Jirafas son amigables.

Can you translate this without running to Google?

Cindy Platt is an educational consultant and home school expert.

Angela understands the world we’re living in, and the world we are fearlessly marching toward. Children today are living in a world where cutting edge technology is as normal for them as peanut butter and jelly. It is in the air we breathe and must be the breath of their thought.

On Monday I posted a video detailing the differences between a tired yesterday and an eager tomorrow. On Tuesday I wanted to look at the dual immersion program our daughter attends, where the majority of her day is spent soaking up the syllables of a second language; a rarity in public education that should be as common as the parking lot. On  Wednesday I shared the smudged ink of my own fingerprint.

This is a subject I could expound upon for eons, but for now I’d like to start with a single week. I’ve sprinkled a nutshell with a few of the more obvious problems. Today I’m handing the keyboard to Cindy so she can discuss someone who is offering solutions.

Reading Classroom Habitudes was like watching an epic episode of “Lost.”  As with that show, I felt not only gratified by the delivery, but found myself begging the important questions: what if, I wonder who, and is that even possible? Angela’s book has a genuine matter of fact tone that can benefit any learner, from early to confident across any continent.

Angela’s message  screams loud, clear and simple – if we do not rethink how we teach our 21st century learners their daily habits and lifetime attitudes, and imbue them with a technologically savvy mind and proper tool set to accompany the most effective learning process, we are headed for a massive train wreck that will take untold time to recover from.

Our nation’s schools may be filled with dedicated teachers, but those teachers do not share equality across the fifty states. The absence of widely available technology, accessible to anyone and at a reasonable cost, or the needed expertise to deliver cutting edge, engaging content seems to me like malpractice when you know the engines of our world are roaring ahead at the speed of broadband.

It’s like we’re trying to merge onto the freeway in a Model T.

Establishing a work ethic that celebrates imagination, curiosity, self awareness, perseverence and adaptability is what makes learning a verb. It is the missing link and essential ingredient absent in today’s curriculum.  Angela is authentic, articulate and keeps her message direct. Classroom Habitudes is the kind of book you can open to any page and something inspirational will either grab you, captivate you, or make you stop and contemplate.

Stop, think, take action.

Classroom Habitudes serves as a much needed roadmap to an inevitable tomorrow; a vehicle to drive our new world’s curriculum. At the end of the day we must ask ourselves if we are giving equal weight to our questions and answers.

If we aren’t merging Model T’s onto the freeway, then why do we expect our learners to navigate through an archaic world with antique tools that do little to promote critical thought? If you want to carve a life style from learning, you must acquire the habits needed to absorb information at a new pace the world has only recently come to know. Angela’s Classroom Habitudes is a book that could become the daily bible to keep us mindful of our must do’s and may do’s, while never forgetting its most essential audience: 21st Century Learners.

Writer Mom and Dad

Enjoy.
My high school had something called Academic Decathlon, a kind of kid quiz for the college bound; a contest pitting six of the mightiest minds from each of the state’s alma maters in a match to determine which campus housed the most gray matter. I don’t know how towering one’s intellect actually had to be, the baseline really couldn’t have been much more than to the tip of the tree tops, as I was asked to be on my high school’s team.

In fact, my guidance counselor wanted me to play ball so badly, she got me to walk off the field forever.

Let’s rewind.

By the time I was facing my guidance counselor, leaning forward in an armchair saturated by the sweat of an endless procession of adolescents, circumstance had set me on a a hopscotch across 8 different schools, an average of one every other year since birth.

This was my second high school. The first, an unfortunate engagement booked at a local Catholic college prep. This adds a dash of humor seeing as how my family was neither Catholic nor scholastic. The decision to enroll me was arrived at when my parents concluded, despite my protest, that the combination of my neighborhood school and the loud mouth fastened to my face was a potentially lethal merger.

The high school that served as setting for this particular tale was exceptional, at least by common criterion. Not only were the academics admired for miles around, the pleasant neighborhood lent itself rather naturally to an open campus where a short holiday could be booked by the simple submission of a well practiced signature.

Despite the open grounds, there was just one method to gain entry into the student body of this coveted school outside an enviable address, and that was through the school’s extracurricular annex – the High School for the Performing Arts.

I loved the idea of going to a slightly separate high school offering up classes in theater, graphic design, dance, music, and a myriad of other electives. I was especially attracted to drama, but because my face at the time was just recovering from a two year spell of looking like the inside of a Domino’s delivery box, I was loathe to stand on stage in front of an audience of judgmental peers for a performance, let alone the audition required of all new applicants.

My mom suggested I sing, “there are no strings to hold me down” from Pinnochio while wearing the lederhosen she had actually sewn. I’m not joking, but that’s a horrifying enough topic for its own post.

I ended up applying to “Technical Theater,” the limb of the academy that tightened the nuts and bolts of the rest of the body. I loved the learning and the hands on work. I didn’t love the extended daily days that teased the dark in winter, alongside occasional abbreviated weekends, when all I really wanted to do at 16 was work long and hard enough to gather enough dollars to get me out of Dodge.

By the time I was leaning forward in that armchair, my contempt for the system was already rolling to a boil. The spoiled students at that school were hard enough to stomach, but mostly I couldn’t abide the massive amount of missing minutes recklessly mined from an ineffective day. I have always loved to learn and it is one of the few disappointments of a mostly favored life that I consistently found myself as a youth wandering down halls of learning that housed little more than the empty echo of abandoned promise.

I’ll use my Geometry class as an example, because it is one that once raised my ire and yet has now with a decade and a half of distance twisted it toward a smile. In Geometry, we received one point for each homework assignment completed, these points then added to our test grade. There were usually about twenty assignments per unit. A student who did all the assignments, yet scored an 80% on the unit test, would then garner a perfect score of 100%.

I had no difficulty in getting a hundred from the merit of my mind and saw zero value in spinning wheels with busywork at home.

My teacher took issue with my lack of respect for her curriculum. I understood and responded. I told her I didn’t mind doing homework, but felt it should be worth my time. I had demonstrated no need for the extra practice and if she could perhaps provide me with some different work I would be happy to do it. Nope, she said, I could do the same work as everyone else.

I remember sitting in classes feeling minutes slip through my fingers that I would never hold again. I felt as though my school weeks were light on benefit and high in cost. I had been contemplating the GED or some sort of alternative future for a while by the moment providence placed me in the armchair.

The decathlon worked with six students divided into three categories: 2 A’s, 2 B’s, and 2 C’s. Guess which one I was? Gathering the A’s was easy. The gentleman leading the A-Team read trigonometry text books for grins, the other is probably lecturing to his class at MIT right about now. Quality C’s were a lot harder to come by, but the combination of my SAT and GPA made for a cocktail captivating enough for my guidance counselor to call me into her office for a meeting.

My guidance counselor gave me a long pitch, trying to convince me life would be rainbow water slides flowing into pools of milk chocolate if I were only to agree to be one of the team. All I had to do was trade tech for decathlon.

The downsides: My senior year would see school days that ran until 5:00 PM, Monday through Friday, along with Saturdays from early morning to afternoon.
The upsides: My SAT scores combined with my commitment to the decathlon could ostensibly grant me entrance into the college of my choosing.

“No thank you,” I said.

It was only at that moment, seeing the surprise trying to soothe the sudden anger in my counselor’s eyes that I realized she’d given this pitch before. Maybe not exactly, maybe not even for the decathlon, but she was used to both cold calling and closing the deal.

In retrospect, the Academic Decathlon was a tremendous opportunity; a long awaited chance to absorb information at the pace I had always craved. Not only did I fail to see it through that prism, that angle was never displayed at all. Her pitch was all about what she could do for me, all the while operating under the assumption that I wanted the same things that everybody else did. The truth was, I wasn’t feeling too keen on college. If secondary education offered even a fraction of the boredom of my previous years, I wasn’t interested. I wanted to build a business with my bare hands and didn’t want to hurry up and wait four more years to do it.

“No?” she repeated the question as though shaking my head alongside my answer wasn’t universal. “Did you not understand what I said?”

“I understood perfectly,” I replied.

“Well, Mr. Platt,” she dug deep into her superiority, “I can most certainly tell you that you are making a huge mistake.”

“I don’t see it that way.”

“You won’t be able to get into a good college without my recommendation,” she said, though we all know I mean threatened.

“I’m not planning to go to college.” I let the moment settle as the Earth’s atmosphere absorbed the words that before that moment had never been anything but idle contemplation.

“You’re not planning on going to college?” I think in reality she merely sneered the question, but in my memory there is raining spittle and my guidance counselor is twirling a monocle like Snidley Whiplash.

“Nope.” I tucked my hair behind my ear and shook my head.

“Well then, Mister, You WILL FAIL.”

I wish that was only my memory, but alas those are indeed the front page, bold type words given breath by someone pulling a taxpayer paycheck to help effectively guide youth toward the most gilded of their goals. I stared in disbelief, for one of the first times in my life absolutely speechless. She viewed this as an invitation to add hue to the horror.

“I will look you up in ten years just to see how far you’ve fallen.”

At that point in my life, I had been known to get a bit riled up under such circumstances. Not so on this day. My anger in that moment was as deep as any ravine my emotions have ever run, but it merely hung pregnant like an an enraged cloud clinging to the horizon, unwilling to rain across the arid wasteland of her ambiance.

I calmly demanded my transcripts, immediately left campus, and drove across town to enroll in city college. Fortunately, there was a GED test scheduled for that coming Saturday so I was a certified graduate by the end of the weekend.

My parents were both amazing. My father asked me if I was sure I’d made the right decision. My mom probably gave me a high five chased by an off color joke or three, I can’t honestly recall. Regardless, both supported me in full.

I did have one teacher come to check on me. She was the best teacher I had at that school, and one of the best I ever had period. She taught English and was, I believe, the first person to give deep compliment to my writing. She came to my work one day carrying a smile and an “are you sure?”

“Yes,” I said, “I am.”

I ran into my guidance counselor seven years later, three years shy of our appointment. She was one of those souls I always expected to see again. I had mentally rehearsed the million and one things I was sure to let tumble loose from my mouth as soon as I did.

Alas, there is no high drama to conclude this tale. I looked different that day; my hair trim and neck more than just adam’s apple. I was leaving the bank just as my guidance counselor was entering. Her hands were juggling bags, my mind was wrangling sudden feeling. I could see her on the other side of the tinted glass, but she could not yet see me. I swung the door open and held it. She passed through the threshold and my heart stopped, two entire beats.

She turned around and looked at me with no visible recognition. “Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” I smiled from instinct. “Have a nice day.”

I nodded, turned around, and let the door swing shut behind me.

As I crossed the street to the flower cart I had purchased shortly after my 18th birthday, I wondered, “did she recognize me?” The light turned from red to green. I stepped into the street, thought of my pregnant wife waiting at home, and thanked her.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is now a ghostwriter and father who lives happily ever after.

This Deja Tuesday post on dual immersion was originally written late last summer, before Mia entered first grade.

Speaking to my children in Spanish, like the morning cup of coffee or hot water beating on my back, is a small pleasure that polishes each of my days.

I exaggerate my accent and send my gestures sailing straight across the top of ridiculous.  My voice swells, especially when my tongue rolls along the outside of a double R, or when I’m delighting in the oral treasure of an Ñ.

Amid the million daddy do’s of any given day, it’s brilliant fun to steal a moment and step inside the skin of a character that isn’t quite me as though I’m dressing up for a kind of verbal Halloween.

I am not fluent in Spanish, in fact I struggle for every well constructed sentence.  This is part of the reason for my inflated accent.  I treat Spanish exactly like singing: since I cannot do it well, I make sure to do it loud.

I long for the authority of a second tongue.  Spanish is my first new language, but I plan to follow it with something more eclectic, I’m considering Klingon.  I never learned Spanish as a child, despite my Honey and Papí both being born in Mexico, and raising their daughter with fluency. As an adult, I struggle to absorb new vocabulary into a mind already littered with everything from next week’s list, to every thread from the last five seasons of Lost.

I want my children to have what I did not. As some Writer Dad readers already know, Mia attends a Dual Immersion program. 90% of her school day is in Spanish. Yes, I love my daughter, and no, this isn’t cruel.

“Why don’t you just drop her off in Tijuana?” That’s what one of my best friends said when I first told him (quite excitedly) that we wanted to place Mia in this particular program.  This beautiful philosophy, not everyone understands. Music and language are highly beneficial to the development of the mathematical mind.  The internet is an awfully big place, filled with towering terabytes of text, but you’d have to comb it all day to find a half pile of research that disagrees with this elemental truth.

But Writer Dad, how will I know when my child is ready for music, or a second language?

Because you will look down and see their ears. Children are sponges, and we should not ever underestimate them, because they will absorb all that we ask. Delivery is important, of course, which is why we would never throw her into a school in Tijuana. That would be immersion, not dual immersion.

What makes dual immersion successful is the consistent practice of full body response.  This means that the teacher employs language, in addition to gestures, when teaching their class. This was wonderfully illustrated one day at the dinner table, sometime toward the end of Mia’s first month of Kindergarten. “Is it hard sometimes,” I asked. “Not knowing what Sra. is saying,”

“Only if I’m not paying attention,” she said, barely lifting her head.

Exactly.

How is this different from life?  How much do we miss, simply because we’re not paying attention? Being in the Dual Immersion program has not only taught our daughter the basics of another language, it’s taught her some of the fundamentals of a fulfilling life. If you really want to learn, you have to pay attention.

Our last summer was wonderful.  I helped Mia with her Spanish and she helped me with mine. I had a bit more vocabulary than she, but Mia strings what she has together as beautifully as if she were born in Barcelona (Gracias Señora Mochila).

The two of us exchanged words all day long in a room full of toddlers without anyone wise to what we were saying. It was like we had our own secret code. Of course, we were also using our bodies as we spoke, so if the toddlers were paying attention, eventually they’ll get it too.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter, creative blogger, and occasional potty training expert. ]]> http://writerdad.com/education/two-xs-the-first-grade/feed/ 27 http://writerdad.com/education/our-education-needs-a-revolution/ http://writerdad.com/education/our-education-needs-a-revolution/#comments Mon, 09 Mar 2009 08:00:09 +0000 Sean Platt http://writerdad.com/?p=2416 Last week was a lot of fun. Thanks for letting me share my boy. Next Monday, it will be Mia’s turn, but for today and the remainder of this week, I’m turning my eye to education.

For the first post in this series, I’m using video as the following five minutes articulate many of my thoughts with a precision I don’t believie I could manage. The video spans the spectrum of the problem in a broad manner, but I’d like to look it in the eye on a more intimate level starting tomorrow.

Our classrooms are antique, fully stocked with decrepit tools unsuitable to building a modern metropolis for emerging minds. Old broken systems are yielding sporadic and splintered results. This will only lead to a fraction of our possible future.

We are not working nearly as hard or as smart as we need to.

I’ve kept my distance from this subject, but it’s one of larger bodies to orbit my universe and well deserving of more of my attention.

Tell me what you think.

Writer Dad

~ Author unknown

Today I’m handing the Mic to my best friend and wife.  We are teaching a writer’s workshop for fourth graders starting this afternoon, and celebrating with her very first guest post. Daisy’s ready to write full time now. Starting on Monday, you can catch her three times a week in her office over at Namas Daisy.

When it comes to setting goals and realizing results, there are 3 certain conclusions.

Mia’s principal gave a keynote address on Back to School night with an overview of student achievement.  We saw the overall picture of the school’s academic performance; growth, decline, and yearly progress by grade in math, reading and language arts.

These numbers made perfect sense to me and I naturally honed in on the high stakes year – fourth grade. Fourth grade is where the rubber meets the road. It’s considered a high stakes testing year because it is the first one when students take a writing exam in addition to general testing. Fourth grade standardized scores are used as one indicator to determine placement for middle school programs such as GATE (gifted and talented) and special performing arts programs.

Students are given a writing task and accompanying prompt. The prompt may be “Narrative Writing,” “Summary Writing,” or “Response to Literature.” The students do not know which genre will be administered, and the teacher’s goal is to ensure they are prepared for whatever is tested by the state. This year’s exam falls on March 10th.

Mia’s principal noted the decline in scores in English-Language Arts. Sean and I looked at each other… he knew what I was thinking… this is how we could give back to our school.

Every parent signs a school-home compact agreement requiring parents to pledge the following: “As a parent at  _______ school, I know that knowledgeable, involved, encouraging parents have children with positive attitudes toward school.  As the parent/guardian, I will do the following…

There is a list of 6 things you agree to do. I won’t bore you with all 6, but #4 on the list, “contribute at least 10 hours of support to the school,” sent sirens through my mind. We need to teach a writer’s workshop for the 4th graders, I thought, crunching test scores in my head. Since my last position in a public school was teaching 35 4th graders how to make a habit of  lifelong writing, it seemed natural for Writer Dad and I to roll up our sleeves and get busy modeling some good old fashioned nuts and bolts.

What do good writers do?  What does good writing look or sound like, and how do you get there?

Needless to say, our principal was thrilled with our action plan to assist 30 students for 10 weeks in an endeavor to make them more proficient writers.  Tomorrow is day 1 of our journey.  We have our mobile classroom (a small carry-on with wheels) packed with writing tools and an agenda to bulk up, buck up and attack a prompt with confidence. Max and Mia will be in the back of the classroom writing along with the class.

Why not? Start early, finish strong.

We are all teachers with or without a degree. Teachers wield influence, volunteer your time to a school. You may be the only stable adult in a child’s life, the only person passing on culture or hope.  The only ones who dreams for them that they might find a brighter tomorrow.

Daisy

You can subscribe to Daisy’s feed (for free) here.

“To bring up a child in the way he should go, travel that way yourself once in a while.”

~Josh Billings

Last week was our parent-teacher conference for Mia.  As some of you know, Daisy and I send our daughter to a dual immersion program where eighty percent of her day is in Spanish.  She’s in first grade now.  Last year, that number was ninety.

Daisy and I were keen to hear what her teacher had to say.  We felt we had a clear idea, for better or worse, but were looking forward to a dot at the end of our sentence.

Our daughter, it turns out, is quite the the little wordsmith.  Her magnificent maestra is pleased when students can line up three well articulated sentences.  Mia is penning five paragraph papers… in a second tongue.  She has a mature grasp of punctuation, and an apparent fondness for the quotation mark.

Mia isn’t a genius, but she is willing to work hard, and push through most any barrier impeding her comprehension.  She’s been drawing, or writing since she could hold a pencil. She is rarely afraid to try, and therefore most often succeeds.  For Daisy and I, this is a calliope of validating inspiration.

We’ve known Mia for seven and a half years, if we travel back to when she was no larger than a grain of rice, which I think is perfectly fair.  Even then, she was dangling the strings and making us dance.

We were thrilled to have a discussion with an outstanding practitioner who spends the better part of seven hours with our daughter, each and every weekday.  At school, Mia is undaunted.   She’s fearless, and flies without worry, unafraid to fail, but anxious to produce.

At home, Mia sometimes moves with the mayhem of a tornado, juggling several ventures at once.  She twirls from table to table, coloring Christmas ornaments, writing a letter to Santa, all while playing the architect to one of her famous “contraptions.”

It is easy to picture her in the classroom, and we acknowledge our fortune that Mia has a teacher who understands her student and wishes to articulate her productive, capable mind, yet also knows that her enthusiasm must be channeled.  Our maestra will help teach Mia to be organized without squelching her spirit.

Mia’s a wonderful writer because she has an example to follow, and for this I am certainly proud, but there is a caveat.

I sometimes juggle topics like a sideshow attraction, and Mia’s a good enough listener to know that I frequently work on many different things at once.  I must not only crow about the kudos, I must also look upon the side of the coin that is kissing the ground.

Our children are reflections in a puddle; rippling with an image not quite ours, but no doubt our distant double.  To truly know who they are, we must have a clear understanding of who we are.  Only then can we walk them toward their best.

Writer Dad

Sean Platt is a ghostwriter for hire, specializing in SEO web copy and custom blog posts.