The Telephone Game

When our son, Aidan, was old enough, my wife was adamant that he go to a private school. Christine was bullied horribly in public school which left an indelible mark on her opinion. I wanted a rule free, creative, avant-garde teaching environment staffed by former pot smoking hippies from the 60's turned educators. You know, a real artist's haven so we looked into the only private school in our area. When we attended an open house, one administrator boasted,

"We don't have to follow any state mandates, being a private institution."

 

This appealed to my conservative sense that all state mandates are bureaucratic wastes of time. What I didn't know then was that boys are more difficult to educate than girls, and knowing how to effectively teach them requires real skill. For years people always said,

"Girls mature faster than boys."

Today, this is generally regarded as untrue. Girls are more inclined to try to impress their teacher, who is often a woman while boys are equally likely to wonder aloud what will happen if they jump out of a nearby tree. Since girls are more compliant, they are more likely to be regarded as intelligent.

The private school we sent Aidan to was stuck in the 70's. They used outdated techniques like round robin reading and math bees which were rejected by public institutions years ago since such approaches reward the most competent students while ignoring those who need the most help. Public schools know how to educate boys because some of those state mandates thrust new ideas in education into the system. Public teachers understand that boys are sometimes not going to sit still and need to move about now and then.

Early on Aidan was deemed ADHD by his kindergarten teacher who requested that he be tested. In most states it's illegal for a public school teacher to make such a determination due to their lack of actual medical or psychological training. This wasn't my idea of mandate free radical teaching I was hoping for. The previous year Aidan took the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children (WISC) which showed he was two standard deviations above the norm for vocabulary and one standard deviation for math. They didn't want to hear about that even though their own school psychologist administered the test. The first time I heard the letters ADHD strung together was when his teacher called me in to tell me about Aidan's misbehavior. He said,

"I was teaching a lesson when I said to the class, 'Watch carefully. This will happen quick.' Aidan said, "You mean, 'quickly.'"

I was puzzled.

"You do know he's right," I responded.

"That's besides the point. I'm the teacher!" he retorted.

So I got dragged into my son's private school which was costing me $21,000 a year to listen to his kindergarten teacher espouse his grammatically incorrect sentiments. This along with other infractions led Aidan to be put on the "ticket system" which was a punitive scheme by which a student is given five tickets for the week. Each time they get in trouble they lose a ticket. If on Friday they have less than four tickets, they can't go out for recess. If they have at least four, they win a prize. When his teacher explained this to Aidan, he asked,

"Don't you think there should be something for all five tickets?"

His teacher told him that they do it that way so you can lose one without penalty. Aidan inquired,

"If I have a friend who has three tickets on Friday and I have five can I give them one?"

"No, Aidan, you can't do that. You have to follow the rules. One ticket for one infraction," his teacher recited.

"So there's nothing for five tickets?" Aidan asked.

"No, nothing," she explained.

It just didn't seem sensible to Aidan to have a system that didn't reward the top score. One spring day, his teacher had all the kindergarteners sit in a circle to play "Telephone." That's the game by which each student in the circle whispers a phrase in the ear of the adjacent classmate. His teacher started off the game with,

"Spring is here!"

As the phrase made it to Aidan, he whispered to his friend, Hampton,

"Dunkin Donuts."

When the last student recited the phrase aloud, the top of his teacher's head almost blew off. She angrily asked,

"Who told you that?"

She backtracked up the circle looking for the culprit. Aidan knew he was busted so he just waited for the phrase to reach him.

"Give me a ticket Aidan," his teacher commanded.

Now here is where good judgment and youth do not intersect. Aidan explained,

"That's okay. It's Friday, and I have five tickets."

This angered his teacher so she tried to take another ticket from him.

"You can't take two. One ticket for one fraction," Aidan exclaimed.

It didn't help that when his teacher called me, I chuckled a bit. Most of my friends who are parents thought I was teaching Aidan to be disrespectful, but I didn't see it that way. His teacher established a set of rules which he followed to the letter, and in doing so, he found a way to beat the system. Many of the same parents had previously advised me to establish "504 status" for Aidan via an ADHD diagnosis in order to get him more time on tests and preferential treatment. One parent told me,

"It's the only way to level the playing field for boys."

The problem is Aidan was not disabled, and as such, didn't warrant protection under the Americans with Disabilities Act. That would be more than disrespectful. It would be criminal.

We left that private school a short time later. I homeschooled Aidan for two years in which he completed three years of education. He entered middle school in sixth grade. He's in the national honor society in high school and plays varsity tennis and trumpet in the jazz band, all things that were unavailable to him at the private school. He was one of the youngest members in Bugles Across America, a nationwide, organization which provides volunteers to play Taps at military services in honor of veterans. He's also a second class petty officer in the Naval Sea Cadets.

The dirty secret about private schools is that they generally have less money than most public schools, and likewise, hire lower qualified teachers. Ignoring state mandates ensures that private schools remain stagnant. We discovered teachers at the institution had assigned the same project to all four of a colleague's children. They use an ADHD diagnoses to cover for their inability to effectivly educate. While most parents welcome an ADHD diagnoses and raise their kids comfortably behind a snowplow, my wife and I were confident that Aidan's behavior was his choice. Boys are three time more likely to be diagnosed with ADHD than girls, and the diagnose is on the rise. One leading expert in the field said,

"We need to find out why boys are more susceptible to ADHD than girls."

I think the answer is because one of the biomarker for ADHD is having testicles. This is not the same thing as believing vaccines cause autism. This is drugging your child on a baseless diagnoses so that he becomes more compliant in an educational system that processes children in batches according to a factory model.

One thing I learned from teaching my son for two years is that kids like Aidan are the real deal. You can't stop them from becoming. Just give them sunshine and some room to grow, and they'll do the rest.

Editor Note: Originally posted on March 16, 2017.