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A new report on why children in day care are sedentary suggests that it’s not the care providers, but the parents, who are mostly to blame.

Parents are the biggest obstacle to letting kids play, says study in Pediatrics - On Parenting - The Washington Post (via npr)

This is why I just let Bean crawl around. If he wants to eat the rocking chair legs, who am I to say he shouldn’t?  He’s learning about those legs!

(via italicsmine)

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Exactly! Let Bean crawl. Let Bean gnaw rocking chair legs. Let Bean become close personal friends with our planet’s pitiless, fascinating gravitational tug.

A few things.

First, a deep breath and a quote from the actual study:

Our findings should be interpreted as exploratory, because this was a qualitative study of child care providers within a single county in Ohio. The primary purpose of qualitative research is to probe phenomena in-depth, not to generalize the results to other populations.

Also, they talked to “nine focus groups with 49 child care providers” and zero parents, so the stuff I’m about to quote about parents being “mostly to blame” is, in some sense, secondhand.

Still, this craziness:

Another surprising finding was that a societal focus on “academics” extended even to the preschool-aged group. Several commented that parents wanted to know what their child “learned” that day, but were not interested in whether they had gone outside, or had mastered fundamental gross motor skills. Participants felt that academics were valued by both low- and upper-income parents, and thus were motivated to demonstrate a “purpose” for gross motor time so that the children would not be seen as  just “running around.”

There’s pretty much only one question I ask our kids at the end of their school day. I ask it with genuine enthusiasm because there’s literally never been a time that asking it has yielded a sighing, stereotypical “Nothing.” This is the question: “Hey, what did you guys do at recess today?”

I like the study’s marching orders for doctors:

Recognizing that school readiness is a prevalent concern, pediatricians may need to highlight for parents the many learning benefits of outdoor play (better concentration, learning about science, negotiation with peers), and reassure parents that active time does not need to come at the expense of time dedicated to “academics” and “learning.” Because we have previously reported that children sometimes are dressed unsuitably for active play, pediatricians can remind parents about the importance of “dressing for success,” which in preschool would be dressed for active play. … Last, in dispensing injury prevention advice, pediatricians should be careful not to reinforce messages that physical activity is inherently dangerous.

Speaking of dangerous, I came home from the library yesterday with a somewhat unhinged book called 50 Dangerous Things (you should let your kids do). The kids and I ended up chewing on aluminum foil and tasting the meaning of, in the book’s words, “foil will create a weak electric current when it contacts the acid in your saliva. If you have any fillings, you may experience an odd tingling in your teeth as the metal in the fillings conducts the electricity to the nerves nearby.” (This would be a good point to stress that our kids aren’t nearly as young as the kids in the study. Start with chewing rocking chair legs. Your preschooler has years to work up to chewing foil.)

- David Quigg, 1/4/2012

(this post was reblogged from italicsmine)
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This basic extension of empathy is one of the great barriers in understanding race in this country. I do not mean a soft, flattering, hand-holding empathy. I mean a muscular empathy rooted in curiosity. If you really want to understand slaves, slave masters, poor black kids, poor white kids, rich people of colors, whoever, it is essential that you first come to grips with the disturbing facts of your own mediocrity. The first rule is this—You are not extraordinary. It’s all fine and good to declare that you would have freed your slaves. But it’s much more interesting to assume that you wouldn’t and then ask “Why?”


This is not an impossible task. But often we find that we have something invested in not asking “Why?” The fact that we — and I mean all of us, black and white — are, in our bones, no better than slave masters is chilling.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates in a post that soars above the mire of the material he’s critiquing — a Forbes piece called “If I Were A Poor Black Kid” by a self-described “middle aged white guy who comes from a middle class white background.” 

I just noticed that this same guy refers to himself in his Forbes bio as “a short, balding and mediocre certified public accountant (biggest downfall: if it’s close enough it’s good enough).”

Cue Ta-Nehisi:

… mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook—but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

Yep.

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SIMPLICIO: Yes, but before you can write your own poems you need to learn the alphabet. The process has to begin somewhere. You have to walk before you can run.

SALVIATI: No, you have to have something you want to run toward. Children can write poems and stories as they learn to read and write. A piece of writing by a six-year-old is a wonderful thing, and the spelling and punctuation errors don’t make it less so. Even very young children can invent songs, and they haven’t a clue what key it is in or what type of meter they are using.

SIMPLICIO: But isn’t math different? Isn’t math a language of its own, with all sorts of symbols that have to be learned before you can use it?

SALVIATI: Not at all. Mathematics is not a language, it’s an adventure. Do musicians “speak another language” simply because they choose to abbreviate their ideas with little black dots? If so, it’s no obstacle to the toddler and her song. Yes, a certain amount of mathematical shorthand has evolved over the centuries, but it is in no way essential. Most mathematics is done with a friend over a cup of coffee, with a diagram scribbled on a napkin. Mathematics is and always has been about ideas, and a valuable idea transcends the symbols with which you choose to represent it.

- from “A Mathematician’s Lament” by Paul Lockhart, which has my brain as wide awake as it has been in a long time

It starts like this:

A musician wakes from a terrible nightmare.  In his dream he finds himself in a society where music education has been made mandatory.  “We are helping our students become more  competitive in an increasingly sound-filled world.”  Educators, school systems, and the state are  put in charge of this vital project.  Studies are commissioned, committees are formed, and  decisions are made— all without the advice or participation of a single working musician or  composer.

Since musicians are known to set down their ideas in the form of sheet music, these curious  black dots and lines must constitute the “language of music.”  It is imperative that students  become fluent in this language if they are to attain any degree of musical competence; indeed, it  would be ludicrous to expect a child to sing a song or play an instrument without having a  thorough grounding in music notation and theory. Playing and listening to music, let alone  composing an original piece, are considered very advanced topics and are generally put off until college, and more often graduate school.

Thanks to NPR’s Robert Krulwich for linking to this essay and the video I reblogged earlier.

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Keats offers his readers the possibility of entering writing from a side door, the one marked “Apprentices Welcome Here.” For Keats went about his work like an apprentice; he took a kind of MFA of the mind, albeit alone, and for free, in his little house in Hampstead. A suburban, lower- middle-class boy, a few steps removed from the literary scene, he made his own scene out of the books of his library. He never feared influence—he devoured influences. He wanted to learn from them, even at the risk of their voices swamping his own. And the feeling of apprenticeship never left him: you see it in his early experiments in poetic form; in the letters he wrote to friends expressing his fledgling literary ideas; it’s there, famously, in his reading of Chapman’s Homer, and the fear that he might cease to be before his pen had gleaned his teeming brain. The term role model is so odious, but the truth is it’s a very strong writer indeed who gets by without a model kept somewhere in mind. I think of Keats. Keats slogging away, devouring books, plagiarising, impersonating, adapting, struggling, growing, writing many poems that made him blush and then a few that made him proud, learning everything he could from whomever he could find, dead or alive, who might have something useful to teach him.

- Zadie Smith in one of the essays from Changing My Mind. It started as a lecture to writing students at Columbia and seems to have been published in full here.

I’m not even done with this essay, but I keep wanting to stop and post quotes from it. Here. Look at this next one. Look at it and tell me how I’m supposed to resist posting what Smith writes about the moment while writing a novel “when there is nothing in the world except your book, and even as your wife tells you she’s sleeping with your brother her face is a gigantic semi-colon, her arms are parentheses and you are wondering whether rummage is a better verb than rifle.”

UPDATE (several minutes later, still on my first delighted pass through Smith’s essay):

I’m back. I don’t want to be, but I am.

Please just read the essay. If you read it, I’ll be able to resist quoting Smith’s take on “scaffolding” and the need to dismantle it. Maybe you already know about the idea of scaffolding in writing. If so, great. Better than great. The concept is so useful. I learned about it from Chip Scanlan when I was still a reporter. Scanlan’s take on scaffolding is here. Smith’s, again, is here.

Read it. Seriously. Thanks. Bye.

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I’m writing this to you because you are the victims of this enormous cheat … Every year, fewer and fewer of you read newspapers, speak a foreign language, understand the basics of how government and business actually work, or have the energy to push back intellectually against me or against each other. Or know enough about history, literature, and science to do it effectively! You spent your school years with teachers paid less and less, trained worse and worse, loaded up with more and more mindless administrative duties, and given less and less real support from administrators and staff.

- from “A letter to my students” (8/24/10) by Michael O’Hare, a public policy professor at Berkeley.

A friend and fellow Berkeley grad used Facebook to link to O’Hare’s letter. That’s how I saw it. The overall message makes me wish I could still vote in California. Things are bleak.

What moved me most, though, is O’Hare’s mourning over students being less and less equipped to “push back intellectually against me or against each other.”

Since it was just a couple of days ago that I used this blog to push back intellectually against another Berkeley professor, I want to give O’Hare props for craving students who can push back intellectually. (I write “props” even less than I say it, but it’s the only word I can think of right now. Not much sleep last night. Besides, “give O’Hare props” beats “I’d like to salute O’Hare” and the other feeble alternatives my brain is offering.)