The Hell of School Lexile Ratings

Remember when reading could be a fun escape and not a strenuous chore that made your entire family have to jump through hoops?  I do.  However, many public schools have decided to destroy reading being a positive thing and are turning it into a nightmare – and more, needless stress on already anxiety-riddled students.

A while ago I wrote a blog on why Lexile levels are basically a made up and evil thing to thrust more work on the children while the teachers have to sit back and do nothing additional to force all this extra work.  You can find that post here:  https://tryingtomom.wordpress.com/2015/04/11/lexile-levels-the-new-way-schools-are-ruining-your-children/

To this day, I still ask my children’s teachers about how these books are scored and why the system seems to frivolously assign numbers to books – and, to this day, the teachers don’t have a straight answer.  They’ll tell me to “go online,” or something like that, which translates (in my mind) as “we have no idea, we’re just forced to force your child into this mess.”  I’ve even had friends who are teachers say Lexile levels are junk and no one, not even the Lexile company, can effectively explain them, or why the Lexile numbers will change on different, unedited prints of the same title.

TODAY, I’d like to share with you the process of helping a child with their reading homework in 2016.

1. The teacher will send home something that tells you how many books your child must test on in the quarter.  Your child can read any book in their Lexile level that has a corresponding A.R. test, so that the teachers never have to be bothered to create tests or grade papers again.  The number of books required tends to run about one book per week in our district.
2. Your school’s library will inevitably be “short” on books that are a) in your child’s Lexile level, b) have an online A.R. test available, and c) are age appropriate.  For example, my son’s Lexile puts him in with Anne Rice and Steven Hawkin – neither of which are appropriate for an 11-year-old.
3. In a desperate attempt to help your kid not fail their reading class, you go to Lexile.com to search for a book by Lexile and age range.  You also may need to sacrifice a small animal to their webmaster – because that search feature RARELY works on demand, and the Lexile levels are changed on books so often that you can’t trust lists you find on other websites.  Actually, it happens so much that many times the Lexile.com site will say one level, and the A.R. testing site will say another!  Prepare to be doomed no matter what!
4. Once you finally locate a list of books, you have to arbookfind.com and verify that any book you want has an online A.R. test.  If it does not, tracking that book down is a waste of your time, grade-wise.
5. If the book has an A.R. test, then you must go to the Renaissance Home Connect website, log in with your child’s school information, and make sure they haven’t already taken a test on the book you’re looking at now.  Please note, even though you can easily access all of this at home, the A.R. tests can only be accessed at school – meaning all the more stress on your child when the media center gets shut down randomly and they cannot test for days/weeks at a time while their deadline ticks away.  Totally fair, right?
6. Finally, kneel down and pray to any entity you think might help you – because now you have to track down the books.  I am very lucky, because our county library has an online system where I can see what they have, place holds, and special order books to be sent from other libraries.  Many others are not that fortunate and will have to go to the library and ask a librarian for help in finding or placing holds on the books you need.  HOPEFULLY, those books will arrive well before your child runs out of time.
7. Get the books in your hands, have your child read them, then watch as the school frivolously “upgrades” your kid to a higher Lexile level – leaving all the books you found worthless for their grade needs.

If you have a merciful teacher, they will count POINTS, not the number of tests taken.  I have heard such teachers exist, but I have yet to meet one.  If the points idea seems confusing:  a simple Mo Willems book (he writes Elephant and Piggie, and that weird little Pigeon guy) might be worth 0.5 points and have a Lexile of 50L, whereas one of the Harry Potter books comes up at 38.0 points and 1000L.

Obviously, if you read Harry Potter, you spent a lot more time on one book, just due to the number of pages alone – hence, more points.  However, when quantity is all that matters, the 5th grade kid who reads at the Mo Willems level will be able to read and take nine online tests significantly faster than the 5th grade child who reads Rowling.  It leaves the higher Lexile level holders at a disadvantage, if not a punishment (because one Harry Potter chapter will have more words than twenty Mo Willems books).  The kids who have to read longer, more challenging novels are still forced to read nine books in nine weeks, on top of all other schoolwork and state testing nonsense, and those kids are often stressed out beyond belief trying to meet their frivolously assigned reading goals.

Lexile levels just seem like the broken BFF of the Common Core system, and both need to get the heck out education!  Let individualized reading get out of the grading process and become a source of simple entertainment again!  Kids have to put up with a lot of crap at school, and they should have mental freedom coming from somewhere.

Homework and the Frustrated Parent

I can remember very clearly my K-12 educational experience in a public school.  Sure, there are some details I’ve probably forgotten, but all the way back to age 5 I can remember a substantial amount of what I learned, and at what point I learned it.  And, you know what?  I can count on my hands the number of times that I had homework in elementary school.  I admit I was a pretty good student, I always understood the material, and I was one of the first to finish my work. So, unless I wasn’t absent over the flu for 2-3 days at a time, I never had anything that I needed to bring home.

As most of us may have experienced back in the “day,” homework was usually reserved for students who did not finish their assignments in class during the allotted time – and, for most of us, we were given plenty of time to finish.  I remember the teachers even asking if everyone was done, and if kids weren’t finish, we got more time!  Back then, we didn’t have anywhere near as much karate, dance, gymnastics, football, soccer, or other after school activities to get to everyday, yet, we were allowed to enjoy our time, watch television, play outside, or just sit around playing with our toys.  So why is it that our kids today are being overloaded with academics?

I read a blog this morning on the Today Show, and I also have a lot of thoughts on this topic (post found at: http://www.today.com/parents/why-one-dad-hates-homework-much-his-kid-does-1D80149262 ).

My son started kindergarten in 2010, and it was roughly what I expected in the education.  They did a lot of hands-on fun things that had secret agendas of learning (painting to learn about how colors mix together, for instance) and they worked on memorizing letters in the alphabet, and their corresponding sounds.  Actually, that’s pretty much what I recall of my own kindergarten experience.

However, the next year, for 1st grade, I noticed a change in that my son was being issued homework to do on Monday through Thursday evenings.  At that point, we didn’t have a big schedule, so I would have him sit down and do all four days worth of homework at once.  It took about two hours to complete, not counting the reading time requirements, which he did daily instead of in one long sitting.  This homework didn’t take an impossible amount of effort, but I did notice quickly that it was all busy work invented by the teachers/school and not actually things that my son had failed to finish during his classes.  Now, I understand that some students need a lot more practice than others, but perhaps the extra work should be given to the kids who aren’t getting it or who need additional help instead of piling it onto every student.

Even though I tried to remain neutral, and always made him do his homework, it didn’t take long for my son to start feeling frustrated.  As the school year went on, I learned that many parents flat out refused to have their children do homework four nights a week, so, on many occasions, my son was the only one turning anything in.  And since, it turned out, that homework wasn’t graded (just checked off), at seven years old my kid knew, without a doubt in his mind, that homework was frivolous.

Right before the 2nd grade started, our family moved from one state to another, and the state we happened into had a very low bar set for education.  They did many things that my son had already mastered in kindergarten and I would see him get back tests about correctly identifying squares, circles, triangles, etc.  Not the geometric cubes, spheres, or cones, I mean legitimate Sesame Street level testing!  Even though the class work was pathetic, homework was still being assigned on a daily basis, and it was still pointless busy work!

The 2nd grade teacher my son ended up with was also terrible, so terrible that I transferred him to another school the following year (would have done it sooner, but the school board requires a lottery drawing to get into a school that you aren’t zoned for).  But she never had any information for me if I asked about my son’s progress, I rarely saw papers come home, and she was close to retirement and checked out without a single care for any of her students.  I directly asked this teacher about my son’s homework, and she just pointed to giant stacks of papers behind her saying “oh, it’s probably in there somewhere…”  What I came to found out on my own was that my son was even more frustrated this year, and he figured out that his teacher wasn’t doing her job, so he completely stopped turning in his homework.  But, you want to know the kicker?  He was still doing the homework every night, correctly, and just throwing it behind his dresser!  Like he was testing his teacher to see when her give-a-crap switch would flip on.

When 2013’s school year started, I had two kids in school, with my daughter going to Kindergarten in one school, and my son in another, very highly academically rated school (while they both won the transfer lottery, there were no schools taking both K and 3rd).  For my son, this was the first year of his state testing, which meant a lot of homework that took two to three hours a night to complete.  The school days are already bumped up from 6 hours to 7, and now these teachers want the kids to have up to 10 hours of their day all about school work?  I also noticed that the end of the year awards were all based on who did well on state testing and not who did well in class overall, or who excelled in math, or anything like that.  What aggravated me even more was that my daughter, who was starting Kindergarten, was also being given nightly homework.  This work she was assigned was really not worthy of doing at home, and was likely an extension of the things she was already doing at school (ie, paint numbers 1-10, count out a 100 Cheerios and bring them in a baggie to school, etc).  It was just more busy work that consumed a lot of time that should have been used on other things.

And what I especially hated was the fact that Kindergarteners are now being forced to read, something that wasn’t going on in 2010 when my son began school.  The kids are NOT being taught or allowed to sound out the words, they have to memorize giant lists of sight words, and their entire academic year hinges on these memorization skills.  I get that some words, like “who,” don’t really work phonetically, so you have to memorize them, but I think it’s disgusting that children aren’t being taught how to sound out words.  What’s going to happen when they’re older and all of a sudden they’re faced with tons of words that were never on their memorization lists?  How are they supposed to figure them out if they are learning words based on sight over sound?

Now, I can say this year has gotten better.  I finally got both kids in one decent school and I’ve notice the homework has backed off a lot.  As of today, the kids might have about 20 minutes worth of work in a night, unless there’s a test to study for or something like that.  I still think it’s ridiculous to assign homework nightly, though.  I bought into the whole scam of school where from K-12 they drill into your head that education is the only thing that matters in life.  That the world is all about what you know on paper, not the kind of person you are, or any other skill sets that you might have.  Even my mother told me not to go to the vocational school for free as a Junior and Senior, because that was for “the dumb kids who won’t go to college.”  So I worked hard on papers and projects, I graduated at the top 10% of my class, and then I went to college and took out a lot of money in college loans. I fully believed that education was so much more important than enjoying life that I never picked up a real hobby, trade, skill, or anything else.

With all of my eggs in one basket and believing that the academic path held the golden keys to my future, I left school with $40,000 in debt and NO JOBS TO BE HAD.  Despite the financial aid office assuring me constantly that I would leave school making $50k a year (in hindsight I realize they never even asked my major), the world is not the place that I was promised.   I have had offer after offer for jobs that are part-time or minimum wage, jobs that don’t even require a college degree to begin with, but there has been nothing that has shown me the guaranteed life that an education was supposed to lead to.  In fact, I make more working for myself as a freelance photographer than I likely ever will make as a college educated woman (and no, I didn’t have a fine arts or photography degree, or even one in business), and instead of figuring out that I was good at photography in high school, and pursuing that option without a mountain of college debt on my back, I believed that education was the only answer in life.  Other people I know from high school are making a good living today instructing martial arts, giving piano lessons, and being dance teachers.  The people who didn’t go to college and opened their own businesses based on their passions, the people who got apprenticeships, or the people who went to the vocational schools over college are making more money and living a better lifestyle than I am able to, all because I thought going to college was the only right path to take.

I don’t write all of this to say that academics are worthless and should be avoided, but I think children need a healthy balance, and the current state of public schools are not allowing that to happen.  We have politicians and school boards making decisions on what kids have to learn and how much homework is required each night, yet these people are not in the classrooms one bit to understand the effects of their actions!  Most of these decision-makers have never been in a classroom since they were kids themselves!  I believe that kids need to do non-school related activities and see first hand that there is more to life than passing or failing a test.  I also think that it’s high time we debunk the myth that college is a magical dream world that makes all of your hopes in life come true.  College is a great thing to experience IF you can afford it, but other than expanding my mind and introducing me to new ideas, there wasn’t a lot of new information that came out of earning my degree.  I became very good at writing twenty page papers and learning how to agree with the professor to get an A, but I didn’t leave with any real skill set, and I didn’t learn much useful information.  If you have to take out loans to attend school, you cannot afford college, and, from experience, it is not worth spending the next ten to thirty years of your life paying these loans off.  The jobs just aren’t out there like they used to be decades ago, and we need to prepare our children for this changing economy over trying to cram endless amounts of academic work down their throats.

It’s a Toy, Not the End of the World, Mom

A few months ago I joined a Facebook group page where moms help other moms get hard to find Disney items at cost.  For the most part, the group page is great.  Women go shopping, they find items that they know are hot and pick up some extras, then they post them for sale at retail listing, plus tax, shipping, and Paypal fees.  It was a wonderful system that helped stopped the eBay sellers from buying up everything possible to resell for a high profit.

So, as anyone with a daughter who loves Frozen knows, Elsa and Anna items have been particularly hard to find.  Now, it’s getting better and things like clothing, posters, and Anna/Olaf toys are pretty readily available.  A lot of the Elsa items are still a pain to track down, but it’s becoming more and more doable.

Anyways, Frozen has had some of the most popular merchandise that Disney has ever created.  I cannot remember a single other instance in my life where a Disney character was this hot of an item  for this length of time.  And, because I am a big planner and a religious checker (went to Disney Stores at opening many times, as well as constantly refreshed their website) I didn’t have a lot of difficulty finding the items I wanted for my daughter.  Not everyone plans so far ahead, though.

Everyday on the above mentioned Facebook group, I see tons of parents posting sob stories about how their child has a birthday in four days and they are so desperate to get an item “or else the party will be ruined!”  Or they’ll say “it’s all my daughter wants, she’ll be devastated if she doesn’t get it!”  Wow, aren’t those some major first world problems? 

Desperate, devastated, and ruined are some incredibly ridiculous words to use in regards to toys and costumes.  Then, you come to find out (through photos posted later) that the children they were freaking out over are 1-4 years old.  If a child that age gets a dozen presents and remembers the one item you couldn’t find, you are raising a thankless brat.  Really, I know we want to give our kids everything because we can, but what ever happened to the days when we didn’t give our children everything that they wanted, and that was okay?  In fact, it built some character and weeded out buying a toy because you could have it and buying a toy because you really, really thought it was special.

I have to admit I’m guilty of this to a degree.  I don’t often go on big hunts for items, or freak out if I don’t get one specific item, but I am a clearance junkie, so there have been Xmases and birthdays where I went way overboard due to 75% off super sales.  I tend to have black out shopping during Black Friday! 

So my kids have a lot, and many times my son will go into the store and see something he likes.  He’ll make a case for why he wants it and how awesome it is, and usually I say to put it back until there’s a sale.  But, the grandparents are more generous than I am on impulse buys, so there are times when he’ll walk out of the store with the item he suddenly can’t live without, he gets it home, plays with it for a little while, then never touches it again.  There was a stent of time where he kept begging for Legos and getting different sets here and there.  Well, two years later some of those kits are still in the box, or were thrown into the Lego bin of random parts without ever being put together.  Needless to say, I stopped letting him get Legos. 

Now, I could be incredibly mistaken, but I don’t think there are many kids who want everything they see long term.

I suppose if there’s a moral or point to this blog, it’s that parents need to calm down about fulfilling their children’s wish lists.  It is not the end of the world if they don’t get a Disney Store Elsa costume to wear for their birthday party.  The sky won’t collapse if you don’t get the right toy, or all the toys they want.  And, for goodness sakes, quit acting like it will, because those kids are watch you and how you act and how you bend over backwards to their every whim, and there’s an excellent chance that this kind of behavior will backfire in your face one day (think of the teen years!).  Not getting everything that you want when you want it is good for kids, it teaches them to cope with minor loss and move on.  It’s also good for the kids’ future teachers and employers, who don’t want to spend all day babysitting “I want it” tantrums.  And many times, once you track down a hard to get toy, the kid has already forgotten that they ever wanted it in the first place.  The sun will rise tomorrow no matter what, but the days will feel a lot longer if your kids become spoiled and ungrateful from being shown love with money.  Just my ten cents on the matter…