Shaw A-Moms: How to Raise Competitive Award-Winning Students

1. Auflage 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4835-5571-3
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 150 Seiten

In A-Moms: How To Raise Competitive Award-Winning Students, attorney and author Marion Shaw shares her insights and methods for raising children that successfully compete in school, college, and as young adults in today's global economy. A-Moms provides 40 simple strategies that are applicable to children of all ages (toddlers, preschoolers, elementary students, middle school students, and high school students are addressed in different chapters) and continue to be valuable assets in college and in the professional workplace. Based on the most current educational research (explained so you can understand it and use it) and insightful family examples, this book will reveal what motivated parents and top students are doing to get high grades, trophies, awards, medals, scholarships, and acceptance into high-ranking universities. This book was written to help you strategically guide your child to achievement of awe-inspiring dreams and goals.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Shaw, Marion

Leseproben

3. Top Students Can Learn About Anything!

One of the most interesting concepts I learned as a lawyer is that people can learn about any topic or idea imaginable. Yes, lawyers must know the law, but, more importantly, we must apply the law to a wide range of factual circumstances. It’s part of the job to learn about all sorts of things. After all, lawyers cannot intelligently argue about mechanical malfunctions, medical surgeries, chemical reactions, crime scene forensics, and so many other factual circumstances unless we first learn a great deal about these subject matters. Fortunately, regardless of what type of jobs we have, we all have the choice to actively learn about whatever we want throughout our lives.

This concept of being free to learn about everything only entered my life as an adult. I believe my parents meant well, but while growing up, there was a thick layer of unspoken rules about what was appropriate and inappropriate for me to learn. My family never discussed news, girls learned household and cooking skills, and boys learned car and house maintenance skills. My brothers and I were taught that women were best at nurturing roles, while men were best at leadership professions.

Given this upbringing, it makes sense that, as a girl, I never imagined in my wildest dreams that I would end up being an attorney. Throughout my high school years, there were many areas of learning to which I instantly tuned out because, based upon the messages from family and society, they did not seem to apply to me. I tuned out any interest in politics, wars, national issues, and world issues, while I continued to get “A’s” in history due to memorization skills.

Aligning with family messages, history books portrayed white men as being nearly faultless leaders, while the incredible contributions of important minority and women leaders were almost completely ignored. In short, I learned almost nothing in history class except how to memorize. Clearly, messages from my childhood were skewed and did not serve me well. I believe that many other people, especially women and minorities, had educations that were narrowed and distorted due to similar messages.

I started college planning on being a nurse, based upon childhood messages that, as a woman, I would be good in this nurturing profession. I never liked it. Even so, I miserably persisted through three years of a nursing major. I thought something was wrong with me because I enjoyed the science classes but did not like the actual nursing, contrary to family expectations and traditional stereotypes. I quit college to get married.

After I married, my husband encouraged me to go back and finish a college degree. He admired my analytical skills and suggested I go to law school. In response, I blurted, “I can’t go to law school!” and truly believed it. When he asked me why, I couldn’t think of any specific reason. A jumble of childhood messages about women being nurturers and men being leaders filled my mind.

Even while I attended law school, my parents were still against the idea of me going to law school. Although I knew they cared about me, they told me bluntly, “Men make better lawyers.” I had to defy my parents’ belief system and be “wrong” in their minds to become an attorney.

As you can see, my struggle to become a lawyer started many years before ever going to law school. I noticed these gender stereotypes already when I was a kindergartner, thinking simply that “boys always get their way.” I did not personally agree, but nevertheless, I still felt a strong need to follow my parents’ values.

I believe that bucking these hidden but unrelenting societal messages is probably the biggest challenge for most students in their pursuit of scholarly goals. Often, when a student wants to achieve more, the values that have been placed in his or her brain during an entire childhood suggest that becoming “different,” “more” or “better” is wrong. It might conjure up feelings of disobeying parents’ or teachers’ expectations, or similar feelings of shame or anxiety. The cognitive dissonance inside that student’s mind can stop that student from succeeding, without the student even knowing why.

Professor Janis Jacobs from the University of Nebraska and Professor Jacquelynne Eccles from the University of Colorado and the University of Michigan found through their research that children are influenced more by their mothers’ perceptions than by the grades they receive in school:

Mothers’ perceptions of their children have a greater influence on children’s perceptions of their own abilities than the effect of their teachers’ ratings of their ability….

This means that even if a girl is getting “A’s” in math at school, she will probably believe her mother’s perception of her math ability more than her grades—even if her mother’s perception is based upon inaccurate gender stereotypes like “girls are no good at math” that contradict her high math grades.

Jacobs and Eccles further explain how a child’s future can be negatively affected by a mother’s stereotypes:

Thus, children of the sex not favored by the stereotype whose mothers hold stereotypic views in a domain may receive less favorable messages about their abilities than the other sex and less opportunity to develop these skills. This may limit their choices so that they develop their abilities only in sex-appropriate domains. Making such choices at early ages may confine girls and boys to “traditional” jobs…by restricting their options to the courses and activities in which they have already invested. For example, girls who choose social activities instead of advanced math classes may limit themselves…to lower paying jobs that do not require mathematics.

In other words, stereotypic views by a mother can negatively influence a child for that child’s entire life, resulting in lost professional opportunities and lower paying jobs, with the child ultimately fulfilling the mother’s stereotype used to raise the child.

In education, a related issue of racial and gender stereotypes in textbooks is that the underlying messages in the photos and words of a school textbook often have a vastly different message than what the textbook purports to teach. The premise of school textbooks implies that studying them will make students more successful. However, if a girl repeatedly sees photos of male scientists in her school books—books that she believes are “facts”-- how damaging is that message to her life success? How life-altering is it for an African-American boy to see a disproportionately high number of photos of African Americans as professional athletes, instead of engineers, in his textbooks—books that he believes are the “truth”? Too many people have inadvertently limited themselves because of faulty value judgments that were taught to them as “fact” and “truth.”

Professor Carl Grant of the University of Wisconsin—Madison and Professor Christine Sleeter, known as pioneers in multi-cultural education, explain how interpretations, opinions, and value judgments are being taught in schools as “undisputed fact” in school textbooks, to the detriment of many students:

Symbolic representations in [school textbooks]…often are used to confer legitimacy on the dominant status of particular social groups.…Symbolic representations…render…subjective interpretations of reality and value judgments are projected as fact….Students are given selective access to ideas and information. This predisposes them to think and act in certain ways, and not to consider other possibilities, questions, or actions.…In this way, curriculum…legitimates existing social relations and the status of those who dominate, and it does so in a way that implies that there are no alternative versions of the world, and that the interpretation being taught in school is indeed undisputed fact.

We, as parents, need to make our children understand that in our version of this world, our children are qualified for and worthy of the very best education and of great success.

To be clear: Knowledge of all kinds is for all of us. The wealth of knowledge that humans know is available for all people from all backgrounds and cultures including us, not just for an esoteric group of intellects. We all can learn and should learn everything we want to learn. It is a liberating experience to find out that we can learn about anything in the whole wide world!

Yes, it is true that learning something new without much prior knowledge or experience is a big challenge. However, people who constantly learn new things get used to the initial frustration and awkwardness of grasping new theories and concepts in order to fully take the opportunity to learn all types of knowledge.

Even with my own childhood situation of growing up with gender stereotypes, I chose to raise my kids differently than I was raised. You have that opportunity too. My children have been taught that knowledge is for everyone. They see me, as a lawyer, challenge myself to learn and use new facts, ideas, concepts, and theories every day. They know that I’ve learned about all sorts of information that society tells us does not apply to most people and, particularly, not to women. They know my rule: If I don’t know something, I just have to give myself enough time and I can learn it. They have seen that rule work over and over with...