Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion I am a hot housing helicopter parent?

I agree, MegMeg. In part, this is a many-headed hydra that has been created because of "student empowerment" albeit in a misguided form-- and just as critically, burgeoning enrollment numbers, particularly at public institutions.

I went to a small public college (not at all selective, but STEM majors were pushed pretty hard), and my DH to a public research powerhouse, of substantial size even back in the day. While this current situation is alien to both of us, there are elements of it that feel familiar to him on that basis-- those are not (in general) the kinds of things that we and our DD are finding off-putting about this.


I think that we are the ones finding it depressing in an existential sense. We are definitely believers in higher ed as education-- not as "job training." This doesn't feel especially like education to either one of us. It feels like a processing step.

Off topic, but HK I recommend the following method for memorizing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci

Apologies if you're familiar with it, but it works incredibly well and is actually kind of fun to implement (in comparison to flashcards -- yuck).

I'm terrible at memorizing (why bother when you can just figure stuff out when you need it?) but has to memorize copious amounts of not that useful data for a career certification I recently obtained. Fortunately, right before my 'bootcamp' class, I saw a special on memorization. This was the technique discussed and I used it to good effect to replicate a large interconnected flowchart and formulas for the exam.

I should point out that I also learned a lot of useful, career-applicable stuff too. Let's hope that your DD gets through this nasty and onto some good stuff soon.

This sort of thing is worse when the answers are:

a) Japan
b) Canada
c) Italy
d) Germany

And when nobody notices that both B and C are correct (Italy capitulated in 1943), it effectively makes the students dumber for having taken the class.

Meanwhile, Czechoslovakia was invaded in the year of... '38? '39? Who cares? As long as you know it was after the Anschluss and the Sudentenland, but before Poland, you've got the facts you need to understand how things developed.

And isn't that the point of dates, to put things in their proper sequence?

Duration, too.

And to know when thing X was happening at the same time as thing Y, but on a different continent.

They help with knowing eras, too.

Dates only seem to become important later, once you have an overall framework.

Score. That was precisely my point with that question.

A much better question would be "Discuss the events and the atmosphere in Italy that led to Italy's exit from the fighting. How did the armistice affect the nation as a whole?"

Unfortunately, though, you can't correct an essay with a Scantron machine.

What fraction of American college freshmen do you think know that it was to protect France from Germany, and that it failed near the beginning of World War II? If the percentage is small, I think it makes sense for college history classes to test for knowledge of facts like these. Ideally, well-prepared college students who know such facts will be able to start with more advanced history classes.

It makes more sense not to extract out the meaningful content of college courses as a way of compensating for the failings of the high schools and of the students themselves.

That essay question I made up is precisely the sort of question that should be appearing in introductory courses. As I said, the point is to learn how to see connections between historical events and write about your own ideas coherently, not to memorize the members of each team during World War II or the year that Czechoslovakia was invaded.

If your goal is to memorize a list of facts, all you need is a mass-market book or two and maybe an internet connection. You certainly don't need to pay a couple thousand dollars (or way more) to listen to an adjunct tell you what to memorize and when to take the online quiz.

The Maginot Line was covered in 9th grade World History in my day, and came up again in APUSH, so assuming these are successful high school students, the percentage should be somewhere in the high-90s.

And it wouldn't even be proper to say "it failed," rather, it would be proper to say, "The French failed to consider enemy alternatives to a frontal assault, to man the line itself properly, and to plan for reserve units behind it that could respond to contingencies." But that's the sort of thing you're supposed to learn in college.

Or, in the case of students who know better, it makes them horrified that the people in charge of teaching them higher order thinking seemingly don't.

This has been a recurring theme in my DD's life, by the way-- because she is a veteran of such questions, in seemingly every subject.

I've written about that problem at length in the bad homework question thread before. Some of them are seriously bad. Bad enough that they're kind of stupid, but worse still when more sophisticated understanding makes them HARDER to get "right." And this is the reality for an awful lot of these test-bank questions.

DD knows that any exam like this is probably going to have between 2-5% questions like that one. She can come back to them at the end and attempt to read the tea leaves, but she knows that she can only get them right about 70% of the time no matter what she does, because-- well, she's effectively trying to get into the head of whoever was writing the darned thing.


Bravo, btw, Dude, for constructing a glorious example of this kind of thing in action.

Another favorite that I've mentioned before is:

T/F Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein for Lord Byron.

DD spent forty minutes on this ONE question once in high school. It enraged her that she KNEW all of this deep, deep background about Lake Geneva, the year-without-a-summer, etc. etc. and yet she couldn't figure out if she was supposed to go with "dumb" or "dumber" on that question, which constituted 10% of her quiz score.

Well, I very rarely second-guess myself regarding my children's education/hobbies. It helps that at 11, they make a lot of the choices themselves. I do discuss and guide but generally do not force partly because it wouldn't work and just make everyone miserable. I don't care what other people think although to be fair I have never been accused of hot-housing. On the other hand, I am always prepared to switch gears if the situation warrants it. I think that as long as you are not so rigid and wedded to your concept/idea/schedule of what your DD must do/have/be, then you will be able to make necessary changes for her well-being.

I am sorry to hear about the difficulties finding peers. That has not been a big issue for us, mostly because my kids tend to gravitate towards peers with similar interests or certain charms/personalities rather than strictly by LOG. However, I will say that it has been good for DS to interact with other kids around his age who also score well on the AMC8/AMC10 through a regional math group. Perhaps consider competition math and regional math groups as a source of peers?