Big Babies

My patience with self-absorbed parents has been wearing thin lately. One Sunday night around 9 P.M., for instance, the phone began ringing every 20 minutes or so for about two-and-a-half hours. There were no voice-mail messages, except for a couple that recorded only an electronic sounding beep. A wrong number? A misdialed fax? Finally at 10:30 P.M., awakened, I hit *69, hoping that if it was a wrong number I could ask whoever it was to please stop bothering me.

But it turned out the caller was a fellow journalist whose son goes to my daughter’s school. I could hear electronic beeps in the background, apparently from her home-office equipment, so obviously it had been her calling repeatedly all night — the way people do when they're trying to flush you out rather than simply leave a message that might be ignored. She knew I'd recently had to start some nasty new fatigue-causing medication, so rightly suspected I was home.

“Well, because I was trying to get hold of you!” she exclaimed when I asked why she'd kept calling and calling without leaving a message. “You see, we've got an urgent problem...” Her ninth-grade son needed info for a team homework project due the next day from a classmate, whose phone number he'd neglected to get, and they didn't have a student directory. “I was hoping you might!” she explained brightly.

“I don't know if I have a student directory,” I said shortly, “but I do know that I'm not getting out of bed at 10:30 P.M. on Sunday night to look for it.” Nor did I have any intention of waking my daughter, who's the one around here keeping track of most school-related info anyway.

The woman sent an apologetic e-mail the next day, although actually it was rather short on the apology and long on the “urgent” explanation, which she apparently felt confident was a completely understandable excuse, if only I could be made to realize her terribly important situation. You see, the classmate was supposed to provide the homework info, but he hadn't, and, well... Etc.

I briefly considered responding with a definition of the word “urgent” concerning late-night phone calls: You have (life-or-death) info that is of vital importance to me. You've just discovered that a psychopathic killer is on his way to my house, for instance.

Not: I might have (non-life-or-death) info that you would like to learn. That is, anything involving your kid's homework problems, which I really don't give a damn about.

But I didn't, I suppose because I've come to realize that some people are just basically hopeless. But what is it with these aging baby boomers who still help their high-school kids out of schoolwork jams and generally continue to treat them like helpless baby birds? Does it have something to do with the parents’ belonging to the when-am-I-gonna-start-feeling-like-a-grownup generation? Do they therefore assume that their own kids should never be expected to behave like grownups?

This seems to be the tacit message of a Morgan Stanley ad I’ve noticed lately in upscale magazines. “Three car payments. Three private colleges. Three weddings,” it begins. A photograph spread over two pages shows three girls in expensive party dresses, evidently sisters, lounging on an equally expensive looking couch. It's an excellent photo, by the way; the girls are pretty but not superhumanly beautiful, like obvious models, and their expressions really do make them seem like sisters: one looks smug, another skeptical, and the third slightly annoyed.

The ad text continues: “I think I am having chest pains. How are we going to pay for all this? Invest? Invest in what? The market is more unpredictable than our daughters.” Then the tag says: “Emotional times require sound, unemotional financial advice.”

Now if these girls come from such a rich family that private colleges and new cars and expensive weddings are their birthright, then lucky them and three cheers for their generous daddy. But if the thought of how to pay for all this gives the unseen narrator chest pains, then here's some sound, unemotional financial advice: Maybe that family ought to rethink what those girls should expect. Maybe everyone would be better off if one or all of them drove used cars, went to public universities and didn't feel entitled to fairy princess weddings at the Pierre. And maybe that wouldn't be the end of the world.

Which brings me to an article I noticed recently in the Los Angeles Times about how college waiting lists favor well-off applicants. Students who need financial aid sometimes find it's used up by the time the college delves into its waiting list.

The photo for the Times piece showed a Los Angeles high-school senior named Alex Lee who has his heart set on Reed College in Oregon. The problem is that because he is only wait-listed at Reed, Alex doesn't know whether he'll be able to afford to go there; Reed has offered admission to 15 waiting-list applicants, but so far not Alex, because he needs financial aid and there might not be enough.

Gee, that sounds kind of rough, that a bright kid (Alex scored 1440 on his SATs) should be disappointed like that. Until you get almost to the end of the story, way down on the jump, where it's revealed that Alex Lee is not just any old high-school senior — he’s graduating from Harvard-Westlake, one of the most exclusive (and expensive) private high-schools in the country. So we're not exactly talking here about a plucky, struggling boy who earned those high SAT scores despite the bad break of having to attend a poor or mediocre school.

But then comes the real kicker: Alex Lee has been accepted, with a financial-aid package, to Pitzer, an excellent southern California school very similar to Reed in that it’s a small, prestigious liberal arts college. He's also been accepted at USC, a fine university that hasn't made him a financial-aid offer yet, but (as the Times piece mentioned in passing) is one of the most well-endowed schools in the country and probably will.

So what, exactly, is the tragedy here? If money is a problem for this family, shouldn't the added transportation costs of attending a distant school make Reed less attractive than one close to home? Apparently not.

“I wish there was some better way to help kids have a chance to go to the school of their choice,” Alex Lee's dad, sounding rather poignant, told the Times. Well, here’s a thought: Maybe the better way would be to help kids realize that when they’ve been accepted at two first-rate colleges, which will cost far less than a third that’s only offered a place on the waitlist with no financial aid, then perhaps it’s time to reconsider what should be the school of their choice.

Try reading some of the research on this subject. Obviously kids need to practice things to get good at them, but at the elementary age, they don't need to be practicing more than the 6-7 hours a day they spend in school. Of course, parents should encourage kids to pursue personal interests that inherently reinforce academic type skills -- reading whatever books interest them, building playhouses (takes quite a bit of measuring and planning), and in my case, forming little "clubs" with my little friends, which entailed writing exhaustive lists of rules, statements of purpose, initiation ceremonies, etc. I'm not suggesting that kids should come home and lounge in front of the TV or play video games 'til bedtime.

I did NO homework, even through high school at a tough prep school, and it didn't hurt me a bit. Sure, I got exceptionally crappy grades, but all the things I learned in the many hours I devoted to things I was really interested in kept my brain developing nicely. I had one of the very lowest GPAs in my high school class, but the highest SAT scores in the class. I was in the bottom 10% of my college class GPA, but had LSAT scores in the top 10%. I'm now quite successful as a banker, and making plenty of money. And I'm taking science courses at night for fun (the serious kind, for science majors, pre-meds, etc.), and getting all A's -- because I want to, not because somebody's telling me I can't go play with my friends or read the book I want to read, until I've done my "homework" for the zillionth time.

Schools should not be allowed to program nearly all of kids' waking hours, shoving out other activities that the children and their parents choose. And if schools wouldn't waste half the school day on nonsense, and on long explanations of the projects that are being assigned to devour kids' free time, and on worthless "presentations" of these "projects", kids could learn plenty during the school day. I've even heard of 5th graders being expected to give PowerPoint presentations and 4th graders being required to produce a "magazine" complete with pictures, index, etc. No wonder they can't multiply or spell or think. If little kids get the idea with their little friends that they want to make a play magazine, that's great. But it's a game, not real work.

I drove on easy street, and I have had to survie trials and tribulations.

When I was a single young woman (23), I moved from Texas to California because my company had work in California not Texas. I would have lost my job in Texas. At that company, I was one of 2 women selected as one of their top 20 employees out of 2000 employees.

My mom suffered a mental breakdown a year later and my dad almost died. It was difficult on all the family.

I suffered through 3 miscarriages, but was finally successful at having a kid. After my first child, I had twins. I survived 2 months of complete bedrest, and did exactly what the doctor ordered so that my twins would not be born early.

Unfortunately, my twin daughters almost died at 6 weeks old from a respiratory illness. One of them has brain damage.

My daughter has done very well considering, and I think that is in large part because of my hard work and dedication.

My husbands hard work early in life did not prepare him for the miscarriages or having a daughter with brain damage. He'll even tell you that. Nothing does. You just have to step up to the plate. We both have done that.

If you live in Texas, the team homework assignment is a state requirement. We hated those assignments and always opted our daughter out of them. She did the entire assignment on her own and made better grades than the kids who worked on a team.

It worked well until her junior year. Her history teacher (a first year teacher who was an ABSOLUTE twit) wouldn't let my daughter opt out. We ended up in a two hour conference with the new VP and the new teacher that ended when my husband forced them to admit that they had no intention of letting her out of it.

My husband then turned to my daughter and said, "You have to understand that these people are typical bureaucrats. They are not here to work with you. They are not here to help you. They are here to tell you that you have to do exactly what the say without thought or deviation."

The state can babble all the "requirements" it likes, but it can't make your kid do this crap unless you go along with it. Any college worth attending will get the picture, when your kid's transcript shows a bunch of Ds and Fs and no diploma, while SAT and achievement test scores paint a clear picture of outstanding academic achievement. An application essay on "Why I didn't waste my time on all those stupid assignments, and what I did instead" will be the icing on the cake. If more parents stood up for their right to direct their own children's lives, the trend would catch on, and the educrats would get steamrolled.

What are team homework projects?

I am sick of homework at my house. Mainly because most of the homework is just busy work. My kids do not need to write their spelling words three times if they already know how to spell the words.

One of my daughters has brain damage. She's done really well, but she is spent at the end of the day. She does okay with math homework because she's good at math. However, she loses it when it comes to any writing assignments. Then we end up getting into fights. I just don't need that with her.

I think I'm going to fight the homework thing more next year.

My parents got me a new car when I was 16. I took great care of that car.

My parents helped my older brother buy a used car. He paid for most of it, and they paid for some of it. He totalled it. In fact, he totalled something like 3 cars.

Like I said earlier, it just depends on the kid. I was always a very hard worker (good grades, didn't get into trouble, etc). My brother was always on the edge. Barely finished college, got into more trouble than me, etc.

Both of us actually turned out okay.

My 2nd graders learned how to make Power Point Presentations.

They actually like it, and one of them makes them for fun at home.

I think the homework should be to study for tests. The kids and parents should know when the tests are and what the material is. If the kids need to work to do well on those tests, then fine. If the kids don't need to work, then they get to play more. Fine with me also.

The parents and the kids can figure out the best way to prepare for a test.

I'm talking about elementary school. High School is different.

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