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

When I was in college, some survey classes required a lot of memorizing, and rightly so. Introductory biology springs to mind. That said, any good intro biology course should also be digging into the scientific method and what it means, so that students don't think that ALL of biology is about memorizing facts like "C bonds with G" and "the stages of the cell cycle are ...."

On the other hand, some introductory courses should NOT require memorization of any kind (e.g. anything in the humanities). As an example, the study of history is about seeing patterns in events and analyzing what was going on. Forcing students to memorize what year the Whiskey Rebellion happened in detracts from that goal. I majored in history, and never took a single exam that asked for a factoid. Most of my course grades were based on essays, and the few exams I took were based on essay questions. Ditto for English.

But of course, bubble tests are ever so much easier to grade. Especially if you administer them online.

You've answered your own question. Hothousers don't try and find balance, they don't second guess themselves, and they would certainly never ever consider the ZPD. Their mantra is more is better, always. If your child can do this, then they need more, no matter what.

Yes, it boils down to second guessing yourself. The closest a hothouser gets to second guessing themselves is worrying that they're not pushing their child hard enough.

Yes yes yes! I'm so sick of people saying that a child should never be made to work for anything academic. And that goes double for kids who sit at school for six hours a day vegetating. I am the product of that sort of schooling, and you do not want my work ethic. It took many years after school finished for me to figure out that if you didn't understand something instantly there was a way to figure it out. Why do our kids get thrown under the bus just because they're more difficult?

Maybe you were such a good history student that you absorbed a lot of facts without consciously trying to do so. But in a course on 20th century history, for example, it would be reasonable to expect students which countries were on the Allied and Axis sides, who the leaders of those countries were, what years various countries entered the war, etc. A factoid is "a brief or trivial item of news or information". Many facts are not factoids.

I think the video Roving Reporter: Canada is interesting, although we don't know how random the sample is. Harvard students, and students throughout the U.S., ought to know more stuff. (It troubles me more that Harvard students think various Canadian provinces are cities than that they don't know the capital of Canada.) But at least Harvard Graduates [can] Explain Seasons .

Thanks Bostonian - I will have remember to look that up in a few more years, hopefully they will keep it current going forwards.

When I was teaching less than 15 years ago, this was true, even at institutions of less 'prestige' than DD's current institution.

Times really have changed-- and at the risk of sounding a bit repetitive or as though I have a particular vendetta against it, I do hold Pearson accountable for a large amount of this change. They are behaving a bit like a strangler fig, which one at first might write off as a relatively innocuous epiphytic organism, maybe even a mutually beneficial symbiotic one-- until you realize that it is stealing the core values right out from under you, while that slick facade never slips for an instant.

This is why a college-level health class makes no mention of contraception or STD's, no discussion of adderall abuse or the burgeoning herion problem on college campuses, but DOES include ample doses of corporate-speak from "motivational seminars."

Val and I have both talked about these "automated" homework systems-- in chemistry and in mathematics. They are clunky and, from what I have seen in how students use them-- nearly useless in terms of actual student learning. But they've taken the place of meaningful practice in both subjects. Faculty are "experimenting" with those systems because enrollment numbers are driving it, along with pressure from-- well, from administrators, I guess. I understand the WHY of that quite well. Students have been conditioned (by secondary testing-testing-testing) to accept such shenanigans as normal SOP, and so few of them complain. On the other hand, when a few of them DO complain, and faculty actually ask-- WHOAHHHHHHH, the floodgates OPEN WIDE on the subject. DD's chemistry professor was astonished at the sheer scope of the messed-up that was MasteringChemistry. But he would never have known if I hadn't insisted that she complain about it. She wouldn't have if I hadn't told her that this was flatly MESSED UP-- as a student, she lacked the confidence to know that the answers were sometimes wrong, or that there were formatting errors that shouldn't be there. KWIM?

I don't actually remember studying much for any undergraduate course-- other than for memorization-heavy beasts like O-chem, botany, gross anatomy, etc. Everything else, there was little point-- you either had worked and UNDERSTOOD it, or you certainly weren't going to get there in an overnight cram-fest. I would not have been able to pass the classes that my DD has been in using that approach, one which she also excels at-- being able to rapidly REASON/derive her way to whatever she needs to solve problems on the fly.

It's no wonder to me that this is causing her some existential problems and anxiety.

Back to hothousing-- I don't really see it as hothousing if you aren't attempting to alter-- FORCE, actually-- the child's innate developmental arc.


I also admit that we DID hothouse some very specific skills-- executive skills, mostly.

I disagree. It's certainly possible to push your child in harmful ways while having some awareness that it's harmful. Whether the parent is aware of the harm they're causing or not is immaterial.

Well, since my name came up, I will make a comment. I have also agonized whether I was "hothousing". There were some pretty strong comments about my daughter's after school math class (which made me want to duck and cover) when I asked if she should continue or not. I have thought even more about after school classes since I posted the question. DD initially wanted this pre algebra math class but later did not want it. We had her continue because we felt she should stick with something she signed up for. But, after all the posts, we decided a compromise was in order. She wants more challenging math next year in middle school but doesn't like this particular math class so she agreed to take an assessment and use Khan Academy to help fill in the gaps before she takes the SSA test. Also, we use the summer to take classes that both DD's choose. I will say, like some others, that if a school did its job correctly, many of us wouldn't be micromanaging his/her child's schooling.
Another thing - I don't know what schools everyone is discussing, but I went back to grad school in the last few years and found it challenging/enlightening/supportive. Perhaps it's just undergrad that is so awful? My undergrad was very hands on but that was long ago.

HowlerKarma, I'm so sorry to hear your DD is having such a depressing experience in college. I would still like to believe, though, that you are wrong that all colleges are like this now. The best of the small liberal arts colleges, because they *are* small, are able to cling to their own vision of why intellectual pursuits are worth pursuing.

One aspect of the problem is the pressures on professors. Although I wouldn't want to go back to the bad old days of no accountability, we are all now a little too scared of having to justify our evaluations of student performance. A student unhappy with a grade, who believes that you have been unfair or biased or used impossible standards (like requiring them to actually *think*, instead of providing cook-book instructions for how to get an A), can drag you through the university's appeals process and suck up an entire term's worth of your productivity, even if they have no case. Multiple-choice exams for which you have provided "correct" answers during lecture are SO much easier, in terms of lack of blow-back.

You missed my point completely (and...ahem, managed to show that you don't understand how the humanities actually work).

We're talking about college-level classes. The point of a college education is (or these days, should be) to teach students how to THINK, not how to memorize things like the list of axis vs. allied powers. That stuff is way, way, way too trivial for a proper undergraduate class.

Students in a history class should be learning how to assess ideas, relate events and motivations, and put their own thoughts on paper in a coherent way. They should NOT be answering questions like "Which of the following was NOT an Axis power in 1944?" These questions create factoids out of information.

Said another way, you don't get to the part about analyzing the Maginot line without knowing who France was trying to protect itself from and why.