It's hard to tell a parent NOT to be encouraging to a child. They want to convince their kids they can be superheroes so that, I think, when the time comes for them to make their choices in life, they will not feel that they did not have the opportunity to follow their dreams. I'm not here to make the conventional lecture about this attitude, that, yes, little Zeno may have the opportunity to play basketball, but if he has poor balance, the NBA may not be in his future. Many little Zenos have worked so hard as to build serviceable careers either as athletes, broadcasters, writers or coaches at all levels of the sport. What I'm concerned about, besides the fact that there are so few opportunities even for the hardworking in an economy which out-speeds itself in speculation as opposed to observation, is that behind the parents' insistence that Zeno can do it, is an acceptance that, if he can't, it's okay, he can live at home.
Now, I have nothing against parents or their adult children who live with them. My question is, though: Did they really give Zeno the green light to go after his dream or to fail at it? And I believe our public schools are complicit in this regard.
In NYC, parents of public school children are given plenty of reasons to feel content with their children's development. Every year, their children are "tested" to see if they can advance to the next grade. The fact that the NY State exams have been proven invalid as markers for appropriate academic achievement by the results of the NEAP exams is not at the forefront of our media. For 18 million dollars, Mike Bloomberg has launched a campaign that makes "I Like Ike" look like it was the slogan for a student-body president. He isn't lying in the sense that these children did pass an exam. That the exam was beneath the students to whom it was given doesn't matter. After all, he could argue, do you ask the average third grade ballet student to be held to the rigor of the American Ballet Theater school? But, if we don't, then how will this young person really know if he/she is on the path to his/her dream? How will young Marie know her math skills are where they need to be if she is to develop into a scientist? How will her parents know?
You're probably thinking Marie and Zeno's parents are happy enough that they enjoy something in life and have some proficiency in it. They know, right, that the odds are good their kids are going to work a job they hate because they're going to have to "do what they gotta do" to survive?
While it may be true that most people don't go on to make a living at what they want to do, that's no reason to destroy their true opportunities from the onset. Worse, it's leaving most of our students with a proficiency which wouldn't even let them follow the field in popular literature or as amateur enthusiasts. Zeno will get all he needs to know about basketball from watching TV, you think? What if he can't understand the best commentators on the sport. I heard a cashier at a local supermarket talk about how she can't stand listening to legendary broadcaster Tim McCarver because "he knows nothing." When I pressed her for an example, she said that he "just goes on and on and nobody understands him." That's like saying that Keith Olbermann has no sense of irony. So, if Zeno's language skills are low, he may miss a lot of information and perspective which would help him to understand the game, how it's reported and how it advances.
When I was a kid, I was given the sense that the world was open to me. When I went on to high school, I was given even more of a sense that I might be a leader within it. In college, I floundered --not academically-- but somewhat artistically. My critical skills were always strong, but I didn't know nearly as much about how plays are actually put on as I thought. And I didn't integrate well into a performing ensemble because I was extremely defensive. Nevertheless, I got excellent grades in my major of Theater and no one ever sat me down to talk about the pragmatics of my entering the field. I went to an esteemed school and my degree was not an artistic one, but one in liberal arts. In other words, for a non-artist, I had done well. But, no one explained this to me, then. I learned this when I went on to get an MFA--a degree designed to test my abilities as a theatrical artist. I learned about what BA programs were and weren't designed to do, and I faced the fact that I could teach, write about or work in a quasi-academic role assisting a director, but that my temperament in itself was going to make it hard for me to direct or act, whether or not I had real talent. Had I been assessed this way in college, I'd probably have changed the strategies I used to plan my studies and my future. I'd've known that I needed to head to a Ph.D. program and I'd've thought of myself as a historian/scholar. Thankfully, my schooling did give me advantages I could have and could still use to pursue that aspect of the field.
My mother and I had a few exchanges in which I assured her I could become a teacher if theater didn't work out. When she asked me, about two years ago, why I felt unsatisfied with my achievements, I pointed out among other things, that I had never "made it" -- never written a play which went to Broadway, etc. She responded in complete shock, "Is that what you wanted? Very few people can do that." It's not the sweet assurance that I wasn't alone in my lack of achievement, but the disbelief that so disheartened me. I had been writing, acting and going to see plays and operas my whole life. Yet, I wasn't expected to have wanted to attain conventional success in the field I spent most of my time working in, at all. What did she think I was doing in those summer acting classes? What was I dreaming about? Was I expected to languish in precocity my entire life? My uncle, I learned about a year earlier, hadn't really given any thought to what I would become -- this despite his being the cheering section at several debates I lead in elementary school and the catalyst for my attending Stuyvesant High School. He said to me, "I had no idea...You were a girl...I thought you would get married." I went to college in the 80's and my uncle is a dentist, my mother a semester away from college graduaton and my father (though absent from my life) was a CPA. My mother insisted in a way I came to see more as pragmatic and faithless, that I could always live at home and she could support me. I'd gone to top schools which had made me a shrewd student, but for all my decent grades, no one really thought they had proof I was going to "be anything." What I had thought was a track record of success was meaningless to those around me. Fortunately, I had been competitive academically my whole life so I had developed useful skills and ideas and even strategies for survival. I had assumed, too, that I probably wouldn't live as an artist and took a teaching job fairly soon after graduation. Until this June, I still worked in the theater as a dramaturg, but it's harder to bifurcate my energies between two worlds and I need to harness them for the job that pays the bills. Acting and directing did help me as a teacher, and I haven't stopped looking at things as an artist. I encourage my students to do the same, but I hold them to real standards. I've found there are a lot of good, young artists out there and not enough good training or work. At least, however, an artist should know if he/she is really as effective as he/she can be. So they know that they had the chance to make use of what luck, hard work and time did offer.
In giving public school students weak assessments, we are denying them their dreams and their parents know this. Parents, I think, have become complicit in extending their children's agonies/adolescence because they don't want to seem like they are limiting their exploration. Inherently, however, their dooming them to floundering, rather than finding their niche. The testing movement is a defensive reaction, not a proactive step toward giving students real skills and choices. It's like saying, "Well, for non-students, they're pretty good." The only ones not in on the game are the kids. And they're not reading the commentary in the local tabloids because it's not there -- our major newspapers don't use higher than 8th grade vocabulary, so it might be possible that some of them would understand it. My students who do see postings about the ease of the NY State exams get infuriated. We ought to ask them what they think should be done. They wouldn't mince words.
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