The Blackboard Awards, an annual event hosted by New York Family’s parent company, Manhattan Media, honoring some of the city’s best educators, invited a panel of New York City teachers to a freewheeling conversation, starting with these fundamentals. Our panel is drawn from public and independent schools, from early-elementary education, middle school, and high school. Together, they have nearly 80 years of in-the-trenches classroom experience. We are grateful they’ve shared their time and thoughts with all of us.
What makes a child teachable?
Lynn Bernstein: Two things: curiosity and the ability to tolerate frustration.
Nancy Arcieri: I think it has everything to do with the teacher. Every kid is teachable if the teacher creates the environment that’s needed.
Caroline Gaynor: Imagine asking what makes a child walk, or talk. It’s just understood. You’re going to read, you’re going to write, you’re going to think. That is a promise teachers need to give to parents. You will learn, just like you walked.
Jon Goldman: I agree absolutely; it’s a given: water is wet, the sky is blue, kids are going to learn. How and what they learn is up to the environment and the people they are exposed to.
David Lebson: I believe that a child’s education rests on a tripod of teacher, child, and parent. If any one of those legs is missing, it’s going to be a challenge. If two are gone, the kid’s not going to succeed. It’ll be a miracle.
What can we say to parents who worry that their child hates to read. Is it really that bad?
Caroline: I don’t believe that a child can hate to read. Where it breaks down is that the right book has not been put into that child’s hand. The child may have never felt that success. The most important thing is lap time—putting your child on your lap and making reading an everyday part of your life.
Lynn: Don’t force a child to try to read; you want to inspire her desire to read on her own. It’s got to be cuddly, cozy love time at home so that when the child comes to school and goes to get her just-right book, it’s filled with associations of snuggling with mommy or daddy or a loved person.
Let’s talk about how the role of reading changes from the early years to middle school, when kids need to be able to synthesize information from texts.
Many of our parents do not speak English. They do not read what the kids are
reading. So that means that of the three prongs, the teachers have to be that
much stronger. For kids who say, “I don’t like this or that,” it’s just another
way of saying, “I don’t understand this and no one’s listened to help me with
it.”
David:
pleasure and being able to decode the science textbook are two very different
things. For a kid who can’t process a science textbook, that’s something a
teacher can help with.
Jon: The idea of sitting down with a good book—not necessarily defined by
teachers as important, but one that can take you away—is the key. That’s what
summer reading should be. If your child wants to spend an afternoon reading a
pile of comic books, let him. Make reading less of a job.
David: How many of us have picked up a book and read three chapters and put it
down? It’s important to remind children that it’s OK to say, “This isn’t the
right book for me.”
Nancy
more structure.
stiff competition. If I’m 12 and I’ve got an hour free, the Internet is far too
tempting to sit down with a book.
Do children learn differently today? They’re multitasking in a tech-saturated
environment, yet there are things they can get online that we couldn’t put our
hands on as students. Is a tech-dense life a boon or a bust to teaching?
Jon: There’s both a boon and a downside. The boon is they can do incredible
amounts of research online. The downside is plagiarism. At first, students
didn’t understand that they were engaging in intellectual and academic theft.
Then, they started getting better and better, so we eventually had to subscribe
to [the anti-plagiarism website] turnitin.com.
Caroline: It’s not that children learn differently, but that what is being
imposed on us may hinder how we teach. Teachers now have to teach only to the
test. That is what scares me the most.
other thing about technology is, again, modeling at home. I have kids for whom
technology means Gameboys, Wiis—pacifiers, stuff to keep the kids out of their
parents’ hair. Other parents set up the computer for play, research, and games.
That’s technology as a tool, not a pacifier.
culture, the focus is, how busy are you? We think if you can do 10 great things
at the same time, you’ve achieved something. That’s the measure of your
success. I think there’s a level of distraction that kids have to deal with
today that we didn’t have to.
David: I agree, [but] we’re asking the wrong question. It’s not, are kids
better at multitasking? But, what kind of tasks are we asking our kids to
accomplish, and what pieces of equipment are in place to help them?
don’t realize that their presentation of self is taken seriously. It’s a very,
very dangerous world. They need to be taught that to present yourself in this
virtual world is how the world is going to see you, whether you were kidding,
or that picture was a mistake, or you weren’t taking yourself seriously.
How do parents, even with the very best interests of their children at heart,
undermine their kids’ success or unintentionally sabotage curiosity?
young children don’t know what interests them. Parents need to present
opportunities to try different things. When the child shows an interest, let
her pursue it. Parents overwhelm their children with their own enthusiasms;
they set expectations and goals and plans. Let the child be the leader.
Jon: Many parents, at least at a high school level, begin to abrogate their
responsibility as parents. A perfect example is summer curricula. Parents say,
“What can you do to make sure that my child reads over the summer?” I’m very
straightforward; the answer is “nothing.” It is completely up to you. I can’t
go in and unplug the TV, turn off the iPod, disconnect the Internet, and say,
“OK, we as a family are all going to read this book and, over dinner sometime,
we’re going to sit and talk about it.”
need to see reality for what it is and to not focus on the negative. When a
kid’s report card has eight As and then a C , for a parent to look at the C and
say, “What is going on here? What is wrong with that?” is just devastating.
other thing is praise. It needs to be honest, tied to achievement, and not
hyperbolic or false. And before parents say, “You’re wrong,” ask the child,
“What are you thinking? Why do you think that?” There’s always a grain, a
reason why they say what they do.
David: I remember learning something from an elementary school colleague. When
a child shows you a piece of artwork or a story, rather than saying, “Oh,
that’s beautiful!” ask him questions. “I see you used a lot of green. Tell me
why?” It’s really almost magical.
Caroline: Ask those open-ended questions.
Jon: Parents forget that you don’t have to be great at everything. It’s OK to
be average at some things. Some kids earn predominantly As and Bs, and then
there’s that one C. The parent comments that this is unacceptable, why hasn’t
the teacher noticed that my child is at risk? I say, at risk of what, of being
on grade level? Because that’s what a C means. Kids have to feel free to make
mistakes. We learn as much from mistakes and failure as we do from success, if
not more. Accept it, own it, because that’s how you’re going to learn.
Homework’s an issue from the early grades up. What should parents understand
about it? How much should they get involved?
Caroline: Homework is an indicator for the teacher. Did the teacher teach what
she had to teach today? Did the children understand it, or does she need to re-teach
it? If a child is having so much difficulty, spending hours with her homework,
just send a note into the teacher. Don’t have the child anguish over it. Don’t
do it for him, just let the teacher know.
to say I have a slightly different take on it. I appreciate parents helping the
children. Don’t do the homework for them, but it’s another adult explaining the
math, or going over upper and lower case letters.
Caroline: And just to clarify, all I want the parents of young children to do
every night is read with their child.
Jon: Speaking at the high school level, helping is OK—much, much more important
than helping is monitoring the fact that it’s being done. There’s nothing wrong
with taking breaks from your time on task. Obviously, if the kid is working
eight hours straight and having difficulty with it, there is a problem.
time management is something that begins in the early years, by third grade.
Don’t tell your child that he or she has to do the homework right away. Maybe your
child needs a half hour off. Talk to your child, agree on a schedule, check in,
see if it’s working. Part of the agreement is if it’s not, we’re going to redo
it, but children need to be part of the decision.
Jon: Stop at the playground on the way home.
David: The most important thing a parent can do is make sure the work is
getting done. We have a supervised study hall that we’re trying to do with the
sixth grade to help them with time management. At the beginning of the
45-minute period they write down what they think they can accomplish, and at
the end they write down what they did accomplish.
really is a human condition to underestimate the amount of time we think a task
is going to take. So parents should never say, “Whatever made you think it’s
going to only take 40 minutes?” This is normal; most people do this. Let’s give
ourselves extra time and think how good it will feel if you finish before.
spent wringing your hands is much better spent rolling up your sleeves. I
always tell my kids to stop planning to plan. Get started.
Jon: It’s always reasonable for a child to ask, “Why am I doing this?”
David: It’s absolutely reasonable for a parent to ask why. Parents should also
understand there’s a difference between, “Can you help me understand why this
is important?” and “Why is my daughter doing this crap?”
A lot of parents find that their child’s education, especially in the younger
grades, doesn’t resemble how they were taught. There seems to be less emphasis
on content than process. There’s less rote memorization and less emphasis on
grammar and knowing all your historical facts by a certain age. Why the shift?
are so many facts and so much knowledge that there is no way that any human
being can learn it all. What we’re trying to teach children to do is to ask
questions and learn how to find the answers.
Jon: It’s breadth versus depth. You don’t need to know the date of the
Pigs
think kids should know the multiplication tables. You should know up to 12 x 12
by the time you’re in the 4th grade, because it makes your life that much
easier.
catch-up that needs to be done, which means that we have to change the
curriculum to fit the needs of our students. So we have kids with 144 IQ who
cannot tell you what a noun is and what a verb is because they haven’t been
taught. They don’t know math in many cases because they haven’t been taught.
Jon: Kids should know by the time they’re in high school how to structure a
paragraph and correctly use capitalization and punctuation. You have to know
the rules before you can break the rules.
Caroline: If a child writes a beautiful essay, why is it important that he
tells you exactly what the noun is? I’m playing devil’s advocate. If this child
writes well, why is it important that the child learn this is the noun, this is
the predicate?
Jon: If they communicate their idea, but they can’t tell me whether that’s the
subject or the object, they know it innately, I don’t have a problem with that.
I do have a problem with the kids who can’t write because they were either
never gifted enough to pick it up on their own or were never getting the
instruction. I find that I spend so much time hammering it home, the idea that you
can’t just sit down and write your paper even if it’s a piece of creative
writing.
How do you know when a parent is helping his child too much or doing her
homework for her?
voice of the writer. You have to know your kids well enough, you know how they
write. When you’ve got vocabulary in there and you certainly know this is not a
kid who experiments with words.
Handwriting? First grade? Dead giveaway. Or a child who I know did not get that
lesson today in math sends in perfect homework.
Caroline: Or an artistic model, you see one kid who had this little messy
model, but that’s the best he could do, and then the other kid has this
gorgeous model and he doesn’t usually draw or create that way.
Jon: It’s not as much of a problem [in high school] that parents are doing the
homework as it is them fixing things up.
Jon: There’s a difference between helping and doing.
Is there something we’re missing? Something we haven’t asked you about that we
should know?
Caroline: I go back to what David said in the beginning about the three prongs.
I like working with parents. It makes my job not just easier, it makes it
better. Parents have a wealth of knowledge that I don’t have.
grow to love your child. We are in the position of raising children; it’s just
in a different space. And we care deeply about them.
David: We want parents to trust us. Parents need to feel empowered. The school
is responsible for doing something to make parents feel that they have a place
in school.
Jon: The most important thing is to be involved, especially if in the public
sector, with not just the school but the bigger picture. They should be
phoning, faxing. It’s unacceptable to have a $450 million budget cut in
education when there’s a promise of the $600 million additional funding. It’s
wonderful that some schools have the ability to be funded by PA associations.
It is not right that other schools don’t have that same access. Public
education means that the public has to get involved.
About The Educators
Nancy Arcieri is a 13-year faculty member and current vice principal at De La
Salle Academy, a private, non-sectarian school for academically talented,
underprivileged city youth. She is also an accomplished ceramicist.
Lynn Bernstein grew up in
graduated from
to teaching via the New York City Teaching Fellows program. Since 2002, she has
taught kindergarten and first grade in
Slope,
Caroline Gaynor is a
attended public schools in the
taught at schools in Upstate New York and
returned to
at the
290, where she is the literacy coach and works with students and teachers
across all grades.
Jon Goldman, a 22-year veteran teacher of the
City
English at
School
also worked with the National Shakespeare Institute at
David Lebson teaches middle school science at the School at
draws students equally from university faculty families and local households.
His career has spanned 18 years, with stints at the
96th Street
Hollywood
Laura Zingmond and Helen Zelon are freelance education writers and frequent
contributors to InsideSchools.org. Their children attend public schools in
Transcript has been edited for length and style.
