Survey data and contradictions

Read this.

Or don't. Basically it says that most teenagers are friends with their parents on Facebook. On top of this fact, it then follows that about 40% of parents required their children to friend them in order to have an account. And another group of parents made their children unfriend certain people.

I found this all very interesting as an example of the control parents exert of their children's lives. I recognize that there are different challenges to raising a child in the age of the internet. But I feel like it's been a long time since parents have known all of their children's friends. It's been quite a while since kids all played in the street together and everyone came over for fruit punch. That's not how things go.

On the same note, children in the past, as evidenced by things like the "Take Your Kids to the Park and Leave Them There" concept, had more freedom to do things on their own. They could wander and play in the park and whatever else with those communities of friends.

The same mother who I am not friends with on facebook also got called out by a neighbor for smoking in the park as a young teen.

In this I do see the recognition of small communities, of the neighborhood ethic that kept kids out of trouble, but there is also plenty of trouble my mother got into that wasn't witnessed and how different is that trouble from what kids today might get up to on the internet. Especially the youngest kids on facebook and similar sites - they've been brought up in an age where they know the potential dangers. This isn't a new, foreign technology. We are internet natives and we speak the language, know enough of the etiquette.

When my mother was planning to get a facebook, she called me first. I'd been on the site for about 2 years at that point, and she called and said to me, "I just want you to know that I'm getting a facebook and we're not going to be friends." This was her way of expressing trust, of saying that she didn't need to know everything I was doing on the internet. Yes, I was in colege by that point, but I was only 15 or 16 when I first joined the site and she had made no move to get on. And before that I was in one of the early waves of myspace users, the sketchiest of "networking" sites.

My mother actually draws strict lines between our mutual contacts. We share about 6 mutual friends, although there are certainly far more people that we have in common. One of our other major lines of separation is her brother. I'm friends with him. She's not. She knows it's a relationship I value and she has friended his wife instead. It keeps a layer of separation between she and I in the internet world.

As for making your children unfriend people, that was particularly interesting to me. How involved are you that you know enough about someone your child is facebook friends with, who apparently isn't their real life friend (because I assume they would be approved then), that you know they should unfriend them. On a day when I was actually home recently, a rare occasion, I got a friend request under an unfamiliar name. We had one mutual friend, a writer/performer I've known for a few years. This women was also a queer performance artist. I looked over her page, considered who our mutual friend was, even who some of the other names in her friends list were that I might know. I friended her. This is social networking for a reason. I don't know this woman, but she could be a potentially useful contact for me a young queer writer. I played through this process with my mother in the kitchen, debating it. She agreed with me. Yes, friend this unknown woman. Yes. She's never even met the mutual friend we share. But my mother has only really met about two dozen of my friends. This can't be a criteria.

When these kids are older, in college and what not, will the parents loosen their grip enough to let them unfriend each other?

Reasons to Follow Your Gut

1. Instinct
2. Subconscious intelligence (probably the same thing as 1)
3. Messages from fairy
4. Your high E string will snap under your fingers if you don't.

Yesterday I gave myself a blister playing guitar. This has not been an unusual event this summer. But when I sat down to play last night, I went gee, if I want to play this at school this year, I should get the strings changed. They're looking worn out. The steel just seemed cruddy and shredded up a little and there was something about the tension in the string that didn't match the tuning I was hearing. I don't know. But I played last night, double checked the tuning, put it away, bandaged up my thumb, nursed the skin at the edges of my fingers where I hold down the chords.

Today, similar routine. Home from work, dinner, pajamas, guitar. I played through "Swimming to the Other Side" a few times, recorded and critiqued and considered what I needed to work on. I played it again, stumbled over the second verse because I couldn't see all the words and the chords based on the way that the page was positioned. I adjusted and started playing again.

And then my high E string snapped. And that was the end of that.

I am excited about being able to play things well enough for sing alongs this year. Bonnie got me in a groove with it during senior week. I look forward to that particular community created in song. This one came from Tree, but there are so many others that are part of a shared sense of who we are, so many musicians loved by my group of friends that we hold dear. And I want the chance for us to sing them together. I've spent this summer working towards that.

Tracking, Leveling, and Other Systems

I complain a lot about New York City's public education system. I do this in the context of someone who spent all 13 years of their education in that system, someone from a family that has been going to some of the same schools for generations (My great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all went to the same high school. My grandfather, mother, my sisters and I all went to the same elementary school). I know a fair deal about the changes that this system has undergone in the last few decades from various anecdotes about what my mother learned in school (she started elementary school in the early 1970s), to what I learned (starting in 1995), to what my middle sister does now (going into 4th grade in 2010). We've watched the changes in structure and expectations of learning.

One of the things that I have a tendency to yell often and loudly about is tracking. When I was in elementary school, the schools were still tracking. I went through school with almost the exact same set of kids for the first 5 years of education (well, starting in 1st grade). I then went to middle school with many of the same kids, plus kids from another school district and I continued to be tracked. This system worked for me. I was a fast learner who went to schools that didn't have gifted programs. I was almost always bored. But without tracking I knew I would be even more frustrated. I could at least be certain that my classmates would pick up the topic eventually, even if it took them another few days. And in the meantime, I would read my book. Additionally, I knew I could be assured of having a few friends in my class every year. As a kid with poor social skills and only a few friends, who was often the subject of bullying by my classmates, I couldn't afford to be unmoored from my support system of friends.

My middle sister hasn't been tracked. Our elementary school has changed to a system in which instead of tracking, kids are grouped within their classes by ability, but the classes are mixed. My sister is clearly a different kid than I was and she likes this system. But she also doesn't much care for school in general and has friends in many different grades (I never knew a single kid in another grade until basically high school, with maybe 2 exceptions outside of church friends). She is social and a quick learner, but not as quick as I was/am. I don't know what it looks like to be taught in that structure, but I do have a certain understanding of how kids self group. In middle school, I was put into an ability grouping within my honors class, with three other high performing students. We did the same work, but at a different level because of our internal community and our sense that we were more able. There aren't enough kids doing the same thing for some of the kids in my sister's class for that to happen (this past year, the highest reading group was only 2 kids).

What has me thinking about this again is this article. If you're going to mix ability groupings, why not mix ages? I regret that I do not come from an educational background where I was not permitted or pushed to skip a grade or two, because, as the article highlights, kids learning at higher levels also often socialize with older kids because they have more in common with them. Particularly age groupings created through a multi-year educational programs that allow kids to finish them in the time it takes - a three year program that kids can finish in 2,3, or 4 years for example. If you're going to break kids down, why not create larger units of kids prepared for a skill across ages, rather than limit them to small ability grouping within ages?

Okay, so this is still tracking. But it allows for a different kind of social integration and is more fine tuned. When you're creating leveled classes like the structure I was educated in, there is still going to be a wide ability range. You only have so many kids to choose from, to make it happen. This seems so much more finely tuned to children's learning needs. Teach them when they're ready. Readiness is a predictor of success in so many ways. It keeps the slower learners from being discouraged the faster learners from being held back. There is only so fast my sister can move in a class of mixed ability. There was only so fast I could move in a tracked setting, even if I was allowed to be taught things faster or earlier as a class. But it seems like ability grouping would be more flexible in allowing children to move through them at their own pace, so that readiness might change the group structure, but not impede the growth of the child.

Return

I think I'm going to return to this blog with a new premise. I was using it as a sight of observational pleasure, but internal and external observation. But sunrise has other meanings. The shedding of light on what was hidden before. Sight and realization in other forms. I have things I want to say, ideas on a lot of different topics to explore. So here I am again. Or will be. So let's go.

I have a post on educational policy coming. Give me a little bit.