1. There is a job for everyone.  If your kids are at least 15, they can go out in the work force and look for typical summer jobs.  A lot of theme parks, beach clubs, and hotels hire extra help for the summer to handle the increase in vacation guests, so advise your kids to start their search there.  For younger children, recommend they determine their most useful skills to help out people in their neighborhood.  Babysitting, mowing lawns, and cleaning houses are common choices, and your kids will likely get work from nearby friends and family members.

2. Preparation is key.  Many teenagers are not aware of the level of professionalism they need to show during the job search process because they have never looked for a job before.  Encourage good habits of arriving to interviews early, dressing conservatively when visiting possible job sites, maintaining a professional voice mail message, and treating everyone (even the receptionist and security guard) at a potential company with respect.  Employers will be impressed with your child’s maturity, and will most likely consider them before other candidates.

3. Don’t dismiss unpaid positions.  Some children only want to work to earn money, but explain the value of completing volunteer work or an internship to build up a resume.  Your child may be too young to land a great position now, but offering to work for a reputable company without pay is a great way to get their foot in the door for opportunities down the line.  It also will look great on college applications later!

4. There are five No’s for every Yes.  In this economic environment, your children may not get the first job they apply for.  They may not even get the fifth job they apply for.  It’s up to you as the parent to encourage them to keep trying.  Going to interviews and formatting resumes for companies is a great way for your children to learn how to conduct an effective job search.  Remind them you are proud of them for taking initiative, and play an active role in helping them by conducting mock interviews and editing their resumes as they continue to search.

When your child lands a job, consider reading our blog post on Teaching Your Kids Financial Responsibility for tips on helping them manage their money.

www.MensDivorceLaw.com

His eldest daughter, played by Lauren Graham, is trying to create a fresh start for her children by moving back home after facing financial troubles.  His successful son, played by Peter Krause, is trying to overcome his own domineering tendencies to emotionally deal with the news that his son has Aspergers, a form of Autism.  Dax Shepard plays Nelson’s terminal bachelor son, who finds out he has a five year old son that he now needs to build a relationship with, and Erika Christensen, who plays Nelson’s hardworking daughter, is struggling with having to sacrifice time with her child for her demanding job as lawyer. 

Needless to say, TV families have come a long way since “The Cosby Show” and “The Brady Bunch.”

A recent article by Don Aucoin from The Boston Globe described current TV parents as less of a clear authority figure, and more of a work in progress.  “What is clear is that Father does not necessarily Know Best, and Mother doesn’t always have much of a clue either,” Aucoin explained.  Carleton Kendrick, a family therapist, is happy that TV families are becoming more diverse and dysfunctional because real families measure themselves against these characters.  “During therapy sessions, families will often say “We’re not ‘The Brady Bunch’ ’’ or “It’s not ‘Little House on the Prairie.’ ’’ These are idealized versions of family life,” Kendrick points out.  Kendrick also mentioned that the pressure to emulate TV families is lessening because there is no show on right now that has that “perfect family” viewers often saw in 70’s.

Parenthood airs Tuesday’s at 10 pm on NBC.

To read The Boston Globe’s full article, “Dysfunction Junction,” click here.

Another student angrily challenged me: “You ask the class, just ask how many of us have our fathers living with us.” When I did, not one hand went up.

I was stunned. These were good kids; I had grown attached to them over the school year. It hit me that these students, at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, understood what I knew too well: The lack of a father in their lives had undermined their education. The young man who spoke up knew that with a father in his house he probably wouldn’t be ending 12 years of school in the bottom 10 percent of his class with a D average. His classmate, normally a sweet young woman with a great sense of humor, must have long harbored resentment at her father’s absence to speak out as she did. Both had hit upon an essential difference between the kids who make it in school and those who don’t: parents.

My students knew intuitively that the reason they were lagging academically had nothing to do with race, which is the too-handy explanation for the achievement gap in Alexandria. And it wasn’t because the school system had failed them. They knew that excuses about a lack of resources and access just didn’t wash at the new, state-of-the-art, $100 million T.C. Williams, where every student is given a laptop and where there is open enrollment in Advanced Placement and honors courses. Rather, it was because their parents just weren’t there for them — at least not in the same way that parents of kids who were doing well tended to be.

In an example of how bad the fixation on race here has become, last year Morton Sherman, the new superintendent, ordered principals throughout the city to post huge charts in their hallways so everyone — including 10-year-old kids — could see differences in test scores between white, black and Hispanic students. One mother told me that a black fifth-grader at Cora Kelly Magnet School said that “whoever sees that sign will think I am stupid.” A fourth-grade African American girl there looked at the sign and said to a friend: “That’s not me.” When black and white parents protested that impressionable young children don’t need such information, administrators accused them of not facing up to the problem. Only when the local NAACP complained did Sherman have the charts removed.

Achievement gaps don’t break down neatly along racial lines. Take Yasir Hussein, a student of mine last year whose parents emigrated from Sudan in the early 1990s, and who entered the engineering program at Virginia Tech this fall. “My parents were big on our family living the American dream,” he said. “One quarter when I got a 3.5 grade-point average, the guys I hung around with were congratulating me, but my parents had the opposite reaction. They took my PlayStation and TV out of my bedroom and told me I could do better.”

Yasir said it wasn’t just fear that made him study: “Knowing how hard my parents worked simply to give me the opportunity to get an education in America, it was hard for me not to care about getting good grades.”

But Yasir’s experience isn’t what community activists and school administrators at T.C. Williams or around the country focus on. They cast the difference between kids who are succeeding in school and those who are not in terms of race and seem obsessed with what they call “the gap” between the test scores of white and black students.

This year, community groups in St. Louis and Portland, Ore., issued reports decrying the gap. After a recent state report on test scores in California schools, Jack O’Connell, the state’s superintendent of instruction, said the gap is “the biggest civil rights issue of this generation” — a very popular phrase in education circles.

But focusing on a “racial achievement gap” is too simple; it’s a gap in familial support and involvement, too. Administrators focused solely on race are stigmatizing black students. At the same time, they are encouraging the easy excuse that the kids who are not excelling are victims, as well as the idea that once schools stop being racist and raise expectations, these low achievers will suddenly blossom.

Last year, two of the finest and most dedicated teachers at my school — one in science and one in math — tried to move students who were failing their classes into more appropriate prerequisite courses, because the kids had none of the background knowledge essential to mastering more advanced material. Both teachers were told by a T.C. Williams administrator that the problem was not with the students but with their own low expectations.

“The real problem,” says Glenn Hopkins, president of Alexandria’s Hopkins House, which provides preschool and other services to low-income families, “is that school superintendents don’t realize — or won’t admit — that the education gap is symptomatic of a social gap.”

Hopkins notes that student achievement is deeply affected by issues of family, income and class, things superintendents have little control over. “Even with best teachers in the world, they don’t have the power to solve the problem,” he says. “They naively assume that if they throw in a little tutoring and mentoring and come up with some program they can claim as their own, the gap will close.”

Perhaps nothing shows how out of touch administrators are with the depth of poor students’ problems more than the way they chose to start this school year. The Alexandria School Board had added two more paid work days to the calendar, a move that cost more than $1 million in teachers’ salaries. So the administration decided to put on a three-day conference they dubbed “Equity and Excellence.” We were promised “world-class speakers.” If only that had been true. As part of the festivities, Sherman formed a choir of teachers and administrators that gave us renditions of “Imagine” and “This Land Is Your Land.” Sherman closed the conference by telling us that if we didn’t believe that “each and every” child in Alexandria could learn, he would give us a ticket to Fairfax County.

Now, six weeks into the academic year, some 30 fights — two gang-related — have taken place at T.C. Williams. I wish those three days had been spent bringing students to school to lay out clear rules and consequences, and for sessions on conflict resolution and anger management.

Last week, Sherman announced that a second installment of “Equity and Excellence” featuring a “courageous conversation” with Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard, will take place at T.C. Williams tomorrow. I am eager to find ways to help my students succeed, but I am afraid that Ferguson — whose book includes a chapter titled “Teachers’ Perceptions and Expectations and the Black-White Test Score Gap” — may underestimate what it will take to meet the challenges that we face.

There is one moment of those frivolous first days of the year that I do keep returning to: One of the speakers, Yvette Jackson, the chief executive of the National Urban Alliance, made it clear that the lip service and labels Alexandria is putting forward are not going to help children who are what she calls “school-dependent learners.” These are students from low-income backgrounds who need school to give them the basic knowledge that other kids get from their families — knowledge that schools expect students to have when they start classes. To her, the gap everyone is talking about is not a question of black and white but of the “difference between children’s potential and their performance.”

“No matter how poor they are, when little kids start school, they are excited; they believe they are going to learn,” Jackson said. “But unless schools give them the background knowledge . . . so they can connect with what they study and feel confident, they begin to feel that school is a foreign place, and they give up.”

For Junior Bailey, a senior in my Advanced Placement English class, school has never been a foreign place, a fact he attributes to his dad. “He has always been on me; it’s been hard to get away with much,” Junior said. He also told me that hardly any of his friends have their fathers living with them. “Their mothers are soft on them, and they don’t get any push from home.”

On parents’ night a few weeks ago, I was thrilled to see Junior’s dad, Willie Bailey, a star on T.C. Williams’s 1983 basketball team, walk into my classroom. Willie told me that after seeing how the guys he grew up with were affected by not having their dads around, he promised himself that he would be a real presence in his son’s life.

With more parents like Willie Bailey, someday schools might realistically talk about closing the gap between students’ potential and their performance.

patrwelsh@gmail.com

Patrick Welsh teaches English at T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria.

[ Article by Patrick Welsh | www.WashingtonPost.com ]

Appearing in the ‘Femail’ section of the paper, the article is entitled “The courts took my children away from me because I’m a working mother“, and describes how Jo Joyce, a ‘high-flying divorce lawyer’, (temporarily) lost her children after her divorce because she was a working mother. Jo says that she has “seen the way courts penalise women during custody disputes for daring to have a career as well as children“, and the author of the piece goes on to say:”Jo has become part of a worrying phenomenon. Courts are increasingly ruling that women live apart from their children after a divorce.”

I’m sorry, but what is ‘worrying’ about that? Parents are equal, aren’t they? What is important is who can best care for the children, not whether that parent is the mother or the father (or both of them). Clearly, there is an anti-father agenda here, and if you read on you will find it:

“Significantly, the British courts take no account of a mother’s natural nurturing instincts or that in a family she invariably takes the lead role in looking after children.”

I had to check that I hadn’t misread this. “A mother’s natural nurturing instincts” sounds to me like something out of a 1950s parenting manual, and I find it quite remarkable that it is still being used in 2009. As for expecting the courts to take account of the fact that the mother is usually the main carer, that of course falls into the trap of failing to treat each case on its own merits.

As the article quite rightly points out, the courts must consider the interests of the child above everything. That being the case (and, I trust, accepted as the correct approach by Daily Mail readers), surely it is clear that it would be against the interests of the child to have as a starting-point a position which favours one parent over the other, before even examining the facts. One of the relevant facts is, of course, the capability of each parent of meeting the child’s needs. If one parent is working full-time and the other is not (or is working part-time), then that is a factor (but not necessarily a deciding factor) that should be taken into account, irrespective of which parent is the one working full-time. This being true, it is no surprise that in a time when more mothers are working full-time and more fathers are not, more fathers are obtaining residence orders – the law is merely reflecting what is happening in society. However, to take the view that more fathers obtaining residence is wrong per se is absurd.

A quick glance through the comments to the article suggest that the author’s views are shared by many in Daily Mail land, which is slightly worrying. Perhaps the family justice system should do more to educate people to explain how it works and, more importantly, why it works that way.

[ Article by | Familylore.co.uk ]