Peer Pressure – The Hammer That Your Teacher Is Not Trained To Use

Peer Pressure – The Hammer That Your Teacher Is Not Trained To Use

Peer pressure is a daily reality. Our children are often taught truisms to help them deal with negative peer pressure (defined as peer pressure they don't like), like “sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me,” or “You're not the boss of me!”

Never fails to fail for one simple reason: the other children aren't affected by it. If they were vulnerable to such reasoning and platitudes, they would not be bothering your child to begin with.

Peer pressure is something all of us deal with, and children are exposed to daily doses without much in the way of teacher intervention and guidance. Unless your child actually complains in a way that makes the teacher concerned for their job, that teacher is likely to stay under that shaded area and watch the kids while chatting with her friends (go check – see if what I say isn't true after four decades of watching it myself while getting sunburned myself).

How do you prepare your child? Rule one of Spiral-Matrix: Never depend on one source (teachers in this case) for anything. Peer pressure is far more pervasive that you may realize. A simple glance at a restaurant (“I can't believe they let their child do that,”) to a folded arms as you share your argument (“What an idiot that he thinks differently from me.”)

To be able to deal with peer pressure, a child must:

1. Be aware of peer pressure;
2. Be able to use, deliberately, peer pressure;
3. Must be taught independence of spirit and self-evaluation;
4. Must be able to teach other children to be independent of spirit and self-evaluation.

The first gives them the means to discover it and deal with it.

The second gives them a user's view of it so they can learn to do so ethically instead of judgmentally.

The third gives them immunity, so they can get the messages, without taking the judgment personally.

The fourth gives them the ability help others amongst their peers so their environment (work, marriage, school) improve.

I did this with my children for several decades. First, I taught them what peer pressure was. I used it deliberately in my classroom, such as when a child was doing something disruptive and with a gesture the whole class goes silent and waits for the child, calmly, non-judgmentally, until they grow conscious that we are waiting, not just the teacher.

Then I taught the kids how to be immune from it.

“Do you have to feel bad?”

“Who is in charge of how you feel?”

“Do you want to give me, the teacher, that kind of power over you?”

“Who decides what you are?”

Then I taught them how to help other children become independent and secure in themselves, putting learning about themselves first, not their image of themselves. They stopped defending their images and took a genuine interest in self-discovery, no matter where they were.

Your children constantly juggle the emotional baggage of a room full of kids with little impulse control and a teacher with little training in how to control and balance it (half of C.R.A.B., our program of Control, Range, Adaptability, and Balance).

Leave your child without the tools to do this, and your child will grow up like every other child.

That's not what we do here at Spiral-Matrix. We aim higher.

If you need help creating such a program, we're happy to help.

Double Scheduling - A Shell Game

Double Scheduling - A Shell Game

According to B. Shoemaker, an integrated curriculum is education that is organized in such a way that it reaches across subject-matter lines, webbing together various aspects of the curriculum into meaningful association to focus upon broad areas of study (Shoemaker, 1989).

Our minds work by association: Memory is the ability to connect present things with past learning.
Creativity is the ability to connect things not normally connected.

An integrated curriculum sounds like a wonderful idea, and is part of what your child needs to succeed in life, as past efforts to compartmentalize education into three subjects (reading, writing, arithmetic) simply results in isolated concepts with little skill at interconnecting those concepts into an integrated whole.

Find me a job where you only need arithmetic and no reading or writing and that's a rare job, indeed!

However, due to the increased legislation in our educational system, a system with at least six levels of administration, and many more agendas in addition from various agencies, our public schools have had their days divided into X amount of time for reading, X amount of time for writing, X amount of time for math, X amount of time for writing, X amount of time for science, X amount of time for social studies.

Into that schedule, they must put lunch, recess, P.E., possibly art and music, library time, transition time for travel, and on top of that any other agendas, like time for charities to teach our kids to make them money (at least three times a year or more - check your own school), fund-raising training, assemblies (including morning assemblies), teacher issues of importance (like who they think should be President), etc.

At present, it would be very odd indeed if your school was not unethically playing the double dip game of teaching social studies at the same time as they teach writing, so when they get asked: "Do you teach 30 minutes of writing?" they can answer, "Yes, we do."  When they are asked, "Do you teach 30 minutes of social studies?" the answer is, "Yes, we do."

What they don't tell you is that they teach them at the same time.

We could just lump all the subjects together and do a paper about the mathematics of the Civil Rights leader's biological functioning read from our research.

They're skirting the multiple legislated mandates for how long you teach a given subject by overlapping things and pretending they are meeting them.  It's a lie.  It's a common lie.  And they are in a position where if they complain, they are punished.  Each level of administration becomes the enforcer for a practice that is both unethical and utterly pretend: We teach x amount each day of this subject.

This is not what webbing, or integrated curriculum, was meant to be.

Let's get practical: What can you do?
1) Go to your school and see where they do this.
2) Complain to your principal (the teacher does not control this, though they can always switch it to a different subject combination, and thus the principal can say, "That's up to the teacher." Complain about the practice, not the teacher.  Tell them you will be going to the school board about it and discussing it at the PTA.
3) DO discuss it at the PTA and suggest a visit to the school board.
They will tell you it is common practice.  They will discourage you.  Folks, spanking kids with yardsticks and paddles was common practice.  You decide what will be common practice in the future - if you take that power.
4) Go to the school board.  Prepare ahead of time.  Listen to their answers and vote for the school board members accordingly.
5) Do it yearly.

Or let it go.
Easy to do.

The question is, are you able to learn how to program a computer while learning how to build a house simultaneously?

Or do you see the shell-game, yet?

Performance Rewards and Power

Performance Rewards and Power

Performance Rewards are a part of U.S. culture in a very pervasive way:
An employee presents a topic on how to improve the business; receives a $500 check.
A street cleaner is first done more than anyone else in his crew; receives a lunch paid by the boss.
A coworker catches another employee at theft; receives a $100 reward for the act.
These rewards give power.
Not to the employee, but to the person who gives them. They are the supplier, the person who controls that action.
To get the reward one must do what the boss asks. To achieve the recognition one must "perform", the root word of the idea.
The problem isn't the reward, or the power. It's when people do not recognize it for what it is.
Then abuses occur.
As educators, teachers give up their independence to work for a administration. They perform for them. It is not a hugely collaborative situation. There are rewards of all sorts for good performance.
Unions often fight such rewards, for a variety of reasons that one may or may not agree with. One of them is the recognition of the power it gives the reward giver over the reward receiver.
The problem is when such a reward is given by the wrong group.
You've lost power over it. Despite the fact that you, the public, have public education, you have very little control because you've given it up in a variety of ways:
A single student has the following agencies above them in the educational system:
Any aides in the classroom;
Teachers
Educational Specialists in the school (reading, math, special education, gifted & talented, etc.)
Librarian
Secretary (rarely, but in forty years, I've seen it before)
Special teachers (art, P.E., music, etc.)
Principal and vice principal (or assistant principal)
Businesses
Charities
Fund-raising organizations
District administration
City government
Educational Organizations
County educational administration
County government
State educational administration
State government
Federal educational administration
Federal government
International educational organizations
Stunned, yet?
Does your business have this many people involved in running your business and affecting your customer?
Some of these may not be clear. Let's clarify:
Any aides in the classroom; (Clear)
Teachers (Clear)
Educational Specialists in the school (reading, math, special education, gifted & talented, etc.) (Your child can be pulled by these specialists if they ever, in any of their years of schooling, don't perform at level)
Librarian (Rewards are constantly given at this level for reading, reports, science fair projects, etc.)
Secretary (rarely, but in forty years, I've seen it before) (This is the person who will likely deal with your child for delivering attendance, doing morning reports to the school over the intercom, etc.)
Special teachers (art, P.E., music, etc.) (Clear)
Principal and vice principal (or assistant principal) (Clear)
Businesses (Rewards with their logos, coupons for their businesses, advertising that your children do for them)
Charities (This one will be a topic all itself at some future date - your children are constantly being asked to raise money for charities and the social pressure your children are being subjected to to do so is extensive)
Fund-raising organizations (These raise money for your school and are designed to sell a cheap product for large amounts using children to encourage your purchases. Huge amounts are earned just because parents take on the product and can't sell it).
District administration (Clear)
City government (This level controls your district administration in education and every political issue of the city affects your schools and thus your kids)
Educational Organizations (These set standards and goals, send out ideas, strategies, methodologies, etc. that schools then choose or are forced to adapt to and use due to some level of pressure.
County educational administration (Yes, there is county supervision of this, whether a trust, a co-op, or individuals assigned to track education in the county. Their findings are used and applied to change your child's education.)
County government (Clear)
State educational administration (Clear)
State government (Clear)
Federal educational administration (Clear)
Federal government (Clear)
International educational organizations (Do not underestimate the effect these organizations have. More on this in a future post.)
Your child has a geometrically diminishing chance of getting an education that is:
Controlled (Power increases with the number of participants, but control goes down, as any member of a tug-o-war team will tell you, particularly when they all have different goals);
Range (Like an amoeba with a set volume, education, though it grows, is constantly being pulled in different directions and to accommodate it pulls back in other areas, constantly having to re-evaluate it's structure, contents, organization. Being told to add technology, but then having to remove things in other areas unless they can also add more time to the day. Adding more time to the day, but then having to pull money to pay for it from other areas. Getting more money, but then owing more to the agency supplying the money in terms of intellectual control - "Do as we ask or we pull the funding.");
Accuracy (They all have slightly different definitions, adding in their own filters of what they consider essential, combined with teachers editing the curriculum to match their own goals, until compromise has made a mockery by the level of appeasement and power struggles each aspect of education goes through before being applied to your child);
Balance (The only thing missing from the obstacle course a truly effective research-based educational innovation has to go through is a tilt-o-whirl deliberately designed to make your child completely dizzy. There is little balance.)
Now, do not misunderstand. ALL these agencies are trying to increase their control, extend their range, become more accurate, and improve the balance of their agenda. What I call, "C.R.A.B.". These are almost all very well-intentioned people.
This is about power. And every level gives out rewards trying to increase their ability to get their agenda in place.
And you have one or more children and one vote.
You gave up control little by little every time you thought, "Gee, it's nice for the (fill in the blank) group/organization/government to reward our kids that way."
You made yourself a little more dependent on them.
Now, if someone doesn't cooperate, the funding, the reward, the option disappears.
Try refusing the Federal government's agenda (they have no control over your educational programs. That's a Constitutional issue.
Yet, refuse to follow their directives and your district food program, a gift of the Federal government, is suddenly threatened with being cut off because you won't run a program teaching the children their most recent agenda.
You gave up this power. Your children answer for it, daily and teachers, the real educators of your children, constantly have to deal with the stress of meeting the expectations of all these levels of control.
And these teachers work directly, face-to-face, with your children.
Are you nervous, yet?

How "Being Stressed" Can Help You Learn

Stress is defined in different ways.  For this purpose we're referring to "test stress" or the kind of stress you feel when learning, and specifically about the alert state, when adrenalin, noradrenalin, and other biochemicals flood the system and get it ready to fight, flee, freeze, or appease.
For students, it's simpler: stress out during the test and fail.

Remember it for a long time.

There is a simple solution based on the very biochemistry we're talking about.
The alert state has a number of effects on the body, but for our purposes here we're going to talk about one:

1) When you are excited, your ability to remember what happens at that moment goes way up.
When you are excited, your ability to retrieve past events goes way down.

2) When you are calm, your ability to retrieve past events goes way up.
When you are calm, your ability to remember what happens at that moment goes way down.

We teach practical methods for achieving a state of calm during testing and removing that state of stress that students develop over years of fearing tests.  We also teach methods for keeping the body in a state of alert during learning to improve the ability to retain what is being taught.

With a little effort, you can find many of these things online for your own use, and we encourage that.

A more organized program is available for sharing with your company or organization; a trainer or speaker is available on request.