Bullied boy commits suicide

Here's an article CNN put out this week about an 11 year old Georgia boy who committed suicide because he was being bullied at school. Very troubling. The boy was originally from the Virgin Islands and other school children were using that fact to taunt him with sexually related language. The article also alludes to a similar case only a month ago in Massachusetts where a boy killed himself after being harassed in school and being called "gay".

The boy in the story had complained about the situation to his mother, who in turn complained about the situation to the school. And what did the school do? They hired a "specially trained liaison" and asked students to sign a "no-bullying pledge".

A "no-bullying pledge???" That's just about one of the stupidest things I've ever heard of. It is as if the school is saying: "Well, the kids signed a contract vowing not to bully. I don't see how they can possibly bully after signed a contract like that. What else can we do?"

So, after a long time of this the boy concluded that nobody could or would help him. One day he came home from school happier than normal and went up to his room where he hung himself. I've heard of that before. That depressed people, once they actually decide to kill themselves, will appear happy and content just before doing so. I've never heard of that happening with children, though. In the end the boy must have decided that he had no other choice.

On warm days I take the kids to the park. We do this all summer long. You know what we see? All around us are parents and kids. The kids are playing. The parents are either playing with the kids, standing around talking with each other or reading magazines or whatnot. But, each parent is always keeping one eye on their child. When we see a child misbehaving we jump in, reprimand them, correct the behavior and then send them back into the social fray to try again. Then we keep doing that until the situation is resolved. If it doesn't get resolved we take our kid home and get them out of there.

I've even had other parents come to me and say: "sorry to bother you, but your kid is playing a bit rough." Then I thank them for letting me know and I go correct the problem. Yesterday I did the same thing when another little boy was playing too rough with Simon.

The other day at the mall a boy was playing to rough with Gwen and she complained to me. I didn't know who's kid it was so I just said loudly: "Gwen if that boy in the yellow shirt is being mean you should just stay away from him." 3 seconds later another dad ran over to have a serious talk with his son.

The point is, none of us are holding "sensitivity training" or asking our kids to sign a "pledge" not to behave poorly. What we're doing is monitoring our children's behavior. When they misbehave we jump in to reprimand and correct the behavior before things get out of hand and remove them if it does.

It seems to me that schools are unable to do this. In schools it is nobody's job to teach children how to behave in social situations. Perhaps this is because, in schools, students so outnumber teachers and other staff that it is impossible to provide the kind of one on one attention I described above.

In any case, students are largely left on their own to create their own social dynamics with their own rules and their own power struggles. And, if social problems arise, kids learn that adults are powerless to help them. Adults are not part of the reality of a student's social life. Instead they are observers who stand outside the social arena, ignorant of its dynamics and impotent to affect it.

Think of it like this: if you had a puppy you wanted to train to be a mature, gentle, responsible adult dog, the last thing you would do is to lock it in a room with other untrained puppies. In that situation you would never expect the puppy to learn the skills you wanted it to learn. And, if the puppy left the room and had bite marks all over it, what would you do? Wring your hangs and ask why these puppies can't learn to get along better?

But, that's essentially what we do with kids in school. We expect other immature kids to teach our kid "socialization." After all, who in a public school is responsible for the social maturity of your child? Nobody. There is no adult in any school who is responsible for the mature social growth of children. And yet we expect them to become "socialized" by sending them to school.

And then, when schools do not do this properly and also fail to properly educate the children, some even suggest sending children to schools for longer each day, more days per week and more weeks per year. The end result is that children spend less and less time with those who are responsible for their social development (their family) and more time with their peers until the peer group replaces the family as the group the student really identifies as "belonging" to.

The only solution I can think of to solve problems like this is to have much smaller schools, with much greater teacher to student ratios. And, it would seem like a good idea to have a bunch of volunteer parents stationed around the cafeteria and playground to monitor and correct social problems as they arise. But, realistically, this is very unlikely. Such changes would be both prohibitively expensive and would take parents away from work.

But, if the best you can think of is to hire a "liaison" or have the kids sign an anti-bullying "pledge", then all you're really doing is reinforcing the lesson that these kids are learning while being bulled: that adults are incapable of helping them when they are in trouble, and if they are unable to solve the problem themselves then they are totally screwed.

In fact, if your school's plan to battle bullying is similar to that described above (sensitivity training and written contracts), isn't that really a sign that the schools are just covering their own asses and they really have no idea how to solve the problem? And if that's the case, then it is true that children really do have no one to turn to if they are being terrorized by other children in school.

In this environment suicide, while horribly tragic, seems almost rational.

A night at the park with our new telescope

Slowly but surely my telescope kit is taking shape. Last night we walked to a local park to do some star gazing and took the whole thing along in a wagon. Here's what it looks like all packed up.

I bought the case a month or so ago. It was designed for Orion's 110ED scope, but it turns out that my 120ST fits in it quite nicely.
Here's a closeup of the case innards. It has slots for the diagonal, two 2" eyepieces and three 1.25" eyepieces.
And here's what it looks like fully assembled.
The wooden legs are also fairly new. It is an Oberwerk surveyor tripod that I found on sale for 50% off. The legs are longer and more stable than the stock aluminum legs that come with the Voyager mount. I played around with the height for a while before settling on where it is. I raised the legs about 4 inches which allows me to see almost the whole sky from a seated position. Objects too near the horizon still require a standing position, but for the most part I can sit leisurely while stargazing. The only drawback is that I have to squat down close to the ground in order to find objects with the EZFinder.

The park last night was a bit disappointing, though. We set up the scope near second base on one of the local ball fields. This gave us a nice wide swath of sky to view and we got to look at Saturn again. However, there were people playing tennis nearby and the court flood lights were so bright I could read by them a couple of hundred yards away. Very annoying. It turns out that my backyard it a better viewing spot due to the lack of gigantic stadium sized flood lights.

Oh well. We're starting to plan our summer vacations which will be at various dark sky spots around northern Michigan and away from big city lights. I can't wait to see some really wide field views of the summer Milky Way from a very dark site. I'm getting very excited about it. I'm hoping to see some galaxies, which are very elusive in the light polluted skies of Detroit.

School: 7 days a week, 11 months a year!

Here's an article from Denver's Channel 9 news team.

On a recent visit to area schools US Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced his plan to improve national education: by lengthening the school day, the school week and the school year. Duncan says he thinks "schools should be open six, seven days a week; 11, 12 months a year."

Personally, I think it's laughable to assume that kids will suddenly to better in school if you just make them endure more of it. One of the things that we've discovered here in our home school is that teaching the kids does not take that much time. We deal with each subject in our daily lessons for about 15 minutes at a time, which is enough time (at their current ages) for the subject to be interesting without becoming boring or too frustrating. We spend less than an hour a day on formal "lessons". This is our 3rd year of doing it this way with Simon and he is at least a year ahead in math, spelling, reading, etc.

Duncan does have an idea I do find laudable, though. In the article he calls for more "autonomous" schools. He doesn't describe exactly what this means, but it fits in with changes I have in mind for public education.

In short, I would be very much in favor of eliminating large administrative boards of education. Instead I would have each individual school run by a board composed of parents and teachers who would have autonomous authority to choose curriculum and establish school policy and spend their own budget. This would give teachers and parents, rather than state and national administrators, considerably more influence and control over the schools in their neighborhoods. Along with this, of course, I would prefer that schools were much smaller with considerably smaller class sizes.

I think it is a big mistake to have schools run by gigantic state bureaucracies and a national department of education that sets rigid curricula for all children everywhere and which, by nature of the size of the bureaucracy, is highly resistant to change and flexibility.

So, I like the idea of "autonomous" schools, but I think the all day, all week, all year school idea really sucks.