The other night, "our kids" got up in the middle of the night, got dressed and walked the one block to the bus stop. When no other kids were there and the bus did not come, they walked back to their house and rang the doorbell because the door had locked behind them. It was 5:15am when the doorbell awoke their father.
The next book on my reading list is "Whatever It Takes" by Paul Tough. It examines the Harlem Children's Zone project and it's founder Geoffrey Canada. It can be purchased at
Amazon.com.
The
NPR website has a 30 minute interview about the project and the book. I highly recommend it, but in case you don't have 30 minutes to spare, here is a synopsis:
Mr. Canada grew up in Harlem, managed to get himself through college, get a good job and move to the suburbs. Here he discovered other parents were doing things that he did not know about like Baby Einstein and reading to their toddlers, things most of us take for granted. He took these ideas back to Harlem and started the "Baby College", where he recruited pregnant and new mothers to join a class teaching them how to raise their babies in a different way. He then started a charter school that the children could attend to continue the "new" kind of education.
His first group of Baby College graduates now attend this school and the students of this charter school surpass New York's standardized testing in Math. Math is used as a guide to overall performance, because this is where children from poverty fail and eventually drop out.
Many parents (usually single mothers) who live in poverty sincerely want a better life for their children. But because they come from poverty themselves (generational poverty) they do not know how to break out of this cycle. Baby College gives them the tools, knowledge and a path to follow.
We have seen in "our kids" the struggle with Math, but it goes hand in hand with not having the reading and comprehension skills that middle class children learn from the time they are born as parents read to their kids and begin the education process. Things that seem simple to us, such as learning to tell time, are a struggle. They lived in a world where time had no meaning; there was no bedtime, no set time to get up to go to school, no schedule to their lives at all. They learn how to draw a clock in 2nd grade math, but they have a hard time grasping the meaning or relevance in their life.
Every weekend we spend as much time as we can reviewing homework, limiting computer games and TV and encouraging reading instead. Recently we made the kids take a rest time before a late evening of Halloween partying. I suggested that they could take a book to their bed and read if they did not feel sleepy. They were surprised and thoroughly delighted with this idea and it was very quiet in their room for the next hour!
Our kids have benefited greatly from the Communities in Schools mentoring and the tutors that help with Math. I am sure they are not paid enough for what they do, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude, as it reinforces what we have limited time to do on weekends.
Do you have one hour a week that you can volunteer to spend with a child? Can you be a mentor or a tutor? It may be the only chance that child has to take a different path in life.
Stephanie
