CODDLE or cuddle?

Monterey Herald 

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Frank Bruni's piece in the New York Times on Sunday basically states tougher education standards such as Common Core may require a tough love that some parents and educators don't like. So some parents are opting their kids out of testing.

 

Bruni is a journalist, not an educator, and it shows. His was a harmful fluff piece about parents who "coddle" their young kids. He misses the many valid points that testing is a total waste unless it is diagnostic for kids. It should not be used for teacher evaluations.

 

Standardized testing is a destructive input into our educational system because it is subtractive to the content of what we teach. High-stakes testing only causes test preparation. Plus it sucks money out of the classroom.

 

Bruni is most fortunate his life experience is around the sheltered, pampered and the entitled. But even so, the conclusions he draws are incorrect.

 

Even the entitled know testing is basely wrong, which is why there is so little of it in private school, but testing and more testing for those who reside in the clutches of poverty is criminal.

 

Putting aside my first impulse to deeply insert some No. 2 pencils (erasers first) in his ears, I'd like to comment on coddling and reality for the vast majority of us in schools with children swaddled in the luxurious lap of desperate poverty.

 

Two weeks ago, we had parent conferences. My cherubs are 10 or 11 years old. A nice age.

One parent confided her child wore a diaper. (I hadn't noticed. The child wears baggy pants all the time.)

 

Later another parent had his kids spinning around me during our conference. One child is on meds (not something I like or recommend) and it turns out the parent is a recovering meth addict — only the recovering part is in much doubt.

 

At last year's conference, an Anglo mom brought in her three children. All incredibly low performers with low attendance rates and low ability. In the middle of the conference, her cellphone rang. For a millisecond this annoyed me. The youngest of the girls beamed at me, "Dad's ready to cross."

 

"Cross?" I said.

 

"Yup. He's at the frontier."

 

"Frontier?"

 

The mother, still on the phone, interrupted her daughter.

 

"We are at the girls' teacher conference. Her teacher is here."

 

The mother addressed me: "Their dad says hello"

 

The mother refocused on the call, "When you going? OK, we love you and will pray for you."

 

She turned off her phone and couldn't look at me. She said, "Their dad was deported. He's in the Mexican desert ready to make an illegal crossing on the frontier (the border.)

 

The girls are 100 percent U.S. citizens, as is the mother.

 

They linked up with the father days later. They live on luck and the edge of poverty. Soon they moved away.

 

Coddle? No, Mr. Bruni. We don't coddle our kids very much. I wish we could. But we do hug them a lot.

 

Paul Karrer teaches in Castroville.