Maybe Private School is Cheaper than Ritalin

I was eating lunch when I got a text from my youngest son today. “95 on Spanish quiz!” he wrote.

Ironically, at that very moment I was catching up on the New York Times, where I stumbled upon the January 28 article, “Ritalin Gone Wrong” by L. Alan Sroufe, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Minnesota. The point of his article was that we all need to wake up and question why three million children in this country take drugs for attention problems, despite the fact that “no study has found any long-term benefit of attention-deficit medication on academic performance, peer relationships or behavior problems.”

Wait. What?

I wanted to weep with relief—and frustration. Where was this article five years ago, when I really needed it?

You see, my youngest son was one of those fidgety boys whose teachers were always eager to share his flaws with me: “He never listens.” “He built the wrong kind of gingerbread house.” “He never remembers his homework.” “He can't sit still.” “He asks too many questions.” Or, my personal favorite, “He has potatoes in his ears.”

It's true that my son is active. If there's a high surface, you can bet he's on it. These days he spends most of his free time at skate parks and doing parkour. In his public elementary school, he was put on a 504 plan at my insistence because his teachers couldn't seem to figure out that keeping him in for recess was a bad idea.

“We've tried punishing him by keeping him inside,” one of the teachers said, “but the punishment has no impact. He pays even less attention than before.” Thank you, Sherlock.

This was the same teacher, by the way, who gave a power point presentation during parents' night that left me so bored that I started fiddling with things on my son's desk. I ended up accidentally knocking a stack of books to the floor and got that “apple doesn't fall far from the tree” look.

My son was bright but his grades in school were dull: A's in the subjects he liked, C's in classes he found tedious. He forgot his homework or didn't bother to do it. He lost things.

“It's ADHD and EDD,” another of his elementary school teachers assured me—while standing in the hallway at a school concert. “Medicate him and he'll be an A student.”

Frightened by the accumulating alphabet of pathologies, I took my son to a professional who specializes in testing for educational disabilities and sat in the waiting room with the door ajar. I fell asleep listening to the tester's droning voice as she had him do repetitive tasks to see if he had an attention disorder. Big surprise: he did.

Except, that is, outside of school. At home, he built the Taj Mahal out of Legos by himself, fashioned a go-kart out of a skateboard strapped to a leaf blower, and talked at great length about concepts like parallel universes. In the driveway, he would try tricks on his scooter for hours at a time until he perfected them. He loved helping his grandmother with her computer. His summer camp counselors said there was nobody more enthusiastic about hiking, canoeing, and dissecting owl pellets.

The teachers and the tester sent me to a psychiatrist, so that my son could be evaluated further for ADHD. The psychiatrist, a lovely young man with lots of degrees but no kids of his own, was so neat and tidy that he arranged pens by color on his desk. He chatted with my son and invited him to make paper airplanes. The psychiatrist spent a long time getting the creases just right on one paper airplane.

My son, meanwhile, built six really gnarly planes, weighing them down at the nose with paper clips and bending the wings in various ways so that the planes could fly in spirals or circles or shoot straight across the room, as one did—right into the psychiatrist's tender temple. After spending less than an hour with my son, the psychiatrist wrote a prescription for a stimulant that would help him focus in school “and rein in his behavior problems.”

“Should I give it to him on a weekend to see how it goes?” I asked.

The psychiatrist waved a hand. “No need. This is very mild. It'll be fine.”

Luckily, I ignored this advice and gave the drug to my son on a Saturday. It was a nightmare. Or, rather, it was my son's nightmare: he spun in circles, couldn't sleep, and said monsters were coming in the window.

We took him off the drug. We made him finish his public elementary school
through Grade 6, then tried our regional public middle school—the same one my older children had loved. It was a disaster. My son had classes of over 30 students apiece and, guess what? No hands-on activities and definitely no recess. He began hiding rather than get on the bus.

What could we conclude, but that our son was defective? At wit's end, my husband and I talked about another psychiatrist and different drugs. What stopped me from doing this wasn't any scholarly article—though I read everything I could find—but our babysitter, a college kid who had been put on Adderall in high school and taken himself off it after three years.

“The thing is,” the babysitter said, “I never knew whether it was me or the drug thinking, and after a while I felt like I'd never learn how to study if I had to depend on the drug.”

Finally I decided to abandon the public school and look at alternatives. We considered home schooling, Catholic school, a farm school, even a year at sea. We ended up in a tiny Montessori School where students did academic work at their own pace, had recess at least once a day, and spent a lot of time building things. Voila. My son was happy. It was so instant and complete a transformation that I had to keep pinching myself, waiting for the other shoe to drop.

It never did. “We love your son's creativity, his humor, and the way he thinks outside the box,” his math teacher told me. “He's a joy to have in class.”

No teacher had ever said that to me before. About my other children, yes, but not about this one. I adore my youngest son—he is funny, creative, witty, smart, daring, graceful, and loving. But I worried about him constantly, because I never thought I would see him succeed in school.

We had two blissful years at that Montessori School. Then what? In eighth grade, my son visited the public high school and was adamant about it not being the right place for him. This time, we decided to listen.

It was frightening to look at private high schools. My husband and I went to
public school, as did our four older children. We aren't wealthy; if we used our son's college fund for private high school, what would we use to pay for college? On the other hand, I felt certain that his best shot at getting into a college and doing well there was to prepare him beforehand.

Oddly, our son passed the private school entrance exams with flying colors. (Or maybe not so oddly: he has always stepped up to the plate when something matters to him.) When his test scores led him to be admitted to a small day school of his choice, I was joyful—but nervous that he wouldn't be able to handle things.

At first it seemed I might be right. This was a prep school, a very academic one, with lots of highly focused, talented kids who were diligent about homework, played sports, and were already talking about college. When our son had so-so first trimester grades, I had that knee-jerk reaction that all parents of children with attention issues have: was this the time for Ritalin or Adderall? Had we reached the end of the line, the point where our son's gifted intelligence and creativity could no longer compensate for his attention issues? I still hadn't gotten over the opinion of the experts that my son needed a drug to fix his brain.

This time, a friend came to the rescue. “We were told that it takes six months to get used to your new village in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer,” she reminded me. “Maybe you should give him that long to get used to high school.”

So we waited. After all, our son might not be getting A's, but he was happy. He joined the cross country team and came home excitedly talking about his Western Civilization and physics classes. “Those teachers really should be on Jeopardy, Mom, they're so smart,” he said.

Now, at the close of second trimester, he is getting A's and B's. Why? Because the classes are small and calm. The teachers are keen to give him extra help. So are the other students. And, most importantly, his intellectual curiosity is on fire.

In “Ritalin Gone Wrong,” Dr. Sroufe concludes that attention disorders are likely not genetic at all, but the result of various environmental factors that demand further study. He believes strongly—as do I—that every child has such a unique profile made up of chemistry, personality, and environmental influences that “there will never be a single solution for all children with learning and behavior problems.”

I know there are children for whom psychotropic medications are literally life savers. But the point of telling my story is this: if you're worried about your child's focus in school, examine his learning environment to make sure it's the best fit. Your child needs to be learning in a place that will support his strengths rather than view him as a problem. For children who are bright or anxious, active or inattentive, simply changing how and where they learn can make all the difference.

Making the leap to a private school setting isn't an easy leap financially, but there are alternatives worth investigating. Charter schools are free and are often Montessori-based, with smaller classrooms and more hands-on experiences. Some schools with religious affiliations may also provide you with an affordable alternative and a smaller, calmer environment where teachers are as invested in your child's individuality as they are in test scores.

Listen to your instincts. If your child is telling you that school is a bad place for him, then it probably is. Consult the teachers and experts, sure, but make your own experience with your child the biggest part of the equation when figuring out solutions. You know your child better than any doctor or therapist does, or ever could.

Consider, too, Dr. Sroufe's final comments as you ponder your child's future: “...the illusion that children's behavior problems can be cured with drugs prevents us as a society from seeking the more complex solutions that will be necessary. Drugs get everyone—politicians, scientists, teachers and parents—off the hook. Everyone except the children, that is.”

How Much Homework Is Too Much?

It's Halloween today, and I'm bleary-eyed—not from getting ready for the holiday, but from helping my youngest son practice his Spanish presentation.
It wasn't a huge deal of an assignment. Just two minutes about someone deceased—he chose President Kennedy—for a Day of the Dead celebration in his Spanish II class. However, he also had homework for English, algebra, physics and Western Civilization—on a weekend.
He's a freshman in high school, and it's been a rough transition for him. His four older brothers and sisters all went to public schools, and they were whipped into shape early by homework drills: endless math sheets, word searches, posters. I gave up ever trying to clean off the dining room table, because somebody was always doing a project--or having a breakdown because a project wasn't done. Sometimes it was me having the breakdown.
These four older children all went to great colleges. Three have now graduated and actually have jobs, amazingly; the fourth is in her senior year and working on her college thesis. Good for them, right? And great for us, too, of course.
Did all of that homework get them there?
I have no idea. I never would have questioned the idea of homework—it was drilled into my head, too, that you should always have papers to keep you busy, even if it meant staying up until midnight to get it done—except that my youngest son went to a Montessori School. The Montessori philosophy was, hey, if you need to review something, here's some homework that can help you. Otherwise, go outside and play, cook dinner with your family, or draw a picture.
“He wouldn't be having so much trouble with high school if he'd gone to a 'real' middle school,” my cousin grumbles.
Maybe. But the thing is, our youngest son isn't really having trouble with high school. He loves his teachers, comes home repeating incredible stories about Chinese philosophers from his Western Civ class or trying out new physics theories. He loves to practice Spanish. He is making friends and shaving minutes off his time at every cross country meet. He's a successful high school student in every way—except for that struggle over homework.
The thing Montessori taught him—and me, too—is that there are lots of important things to learn in this world. Maria Montessori, in fact, had a theory that kids in early adolescence shouldn't even go to a traditional school, but to a farm school, where they could exercise their bodies as well as their minds and become truly engaged in the world. They should do community service and—gasp--hold down a small job, all as a way of stimulating intellectual curiosity.
Instead of doing homework, our son would rather be practicing flips on the trampoline, hiking with his dad and me, working in his father's wood shop, fiddling around on the bass guitar, and, of course, playing video games online.
“Computer games are ruining our kids,” a friend suggests.
Really? Why? Because he's playing games online with a team of kids from Canada, Spain, Germany, and the U.S.? Because they Skype and learn how to work on team strategies together, learning about how each of them lives along the way? Is that why those games are bad?
“He's always fooling around,” my mother argues.
I suppose that's what it looks like from the outside. Having been through Montessori, though, makes me question whether doing seven hours of homework on a weekend is necessarily more valuable than doing everything else that commands our son's attention.
Don't get me wrong—I'm highly impressed by my son's high school instructors and curriculum. And, given what research show about brain development—that our brains are the most plastic they'll ever be until age 16 or so, which means that whatever those brain synapses are doing during middle and early high school years truly impacts what kind of thinker your child will become as an adult--I'm delighted that our son is stretching himself in many different directions.
It's just the homework that gets me. Why isn't it enough to focus on academics all day, and then give it a rest?
In the incredible documentary “Race to Nowhere,” we see a series of students who have been crushed by homework, while parents and academics wonder how they can keep students engaged and inspired. Duh. If homework kills the creative buzz, why are we still letting it bleed into evenings, so that there's never time for a game of cards, never mind chess? Why do our weekends have to be spent figuring out physics vectors instead of hiking in the White Mountains?
The counter argument, I know, is that homework teaches accountability, reviews topics covered in class, and prepares your child for college. In college, though, students are older and more motivated to organize their time. (Plus, let's not kid ourselves, there's more free time in college than in high school.)
Meanwhile, what message are we sending by piling on the homework in high school?
Here it is: Stress is good for you, kids! See how stressed Mom and Dad are? That can be you, too! Stress is what you have to look forward to in college and beyond. Forget friends, fun, family, or even sleep! You'd better focus on school if you want to get ahead—so that you can take on even more responsibility later!
Really? Is that what we mean by preparing children for a lifetime of learning? Sounds like the School of Hard Knocks to me.

Now that School is Out, What Did They Really Learn?

“So what do they teach at that new school, anyway?” my friend Donna asked recently. “Does Aidan still learn math and science? Will he be ready for high school?”
School has been out for a week now, and the kids have moved on to whatever they're doing this summer, notebooks and backpacks happily abandoned in whatever closet they'll live in until we dust them off in September. So Donna's question took me by surprise.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Of course he learned math.”
“I thought it was an alternative school,” she pressed. “What kind of education is it?”
Last fall, my son Aidan started seventh grade at the public junior high school. It was a disaster; my son hated it so much that I had to crowbar him out of the house.
What didn't he like?
Everything. Mostly, Aidan was bored. In his view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
“What a complainer,” my mother sniffed. “Just make him get up and go. Everyone goes to school. You did.”
I did, it was true. And I hated school too. Especially junior high. I was bored. In my view: There were too many classes. The homework was stupid. The bus ride was too long.
Whoops.
Our four older children went to the public high school and did well. All got into good colleges. This caboose of a child is a different story. Aidan isn't the type to sit still when bored. No, he's the kind of kid who, when he wants excitement, will make his own, like the day he got busted in elementary school for running a casino at his desk. His favorite times in seventh grade were when he got sent to the principal's office.
“At least then I'm not sitting in some boring class,” he said.
I had to do something before trouble became Aidan's favorite pastime. I met with his teachers, who just said he had to learn to sit still and control his impulsive behavior. They whispered about ADHD.
I already knew that Aidan had attention and organization problems. I also knew that, under certain circumstances, he could focus better than anyone.
After visiting several private schools in our area, I stumbled across a small Montessori school. Amazingly, they had an opening mid-fall in their seventh grade. Even more amazingly, when I described Aidan's progress, or lack of it, they were up to the challenge.
I knew nothing about Montessori. But I was at the end of my rope: Aidan had to go somewhere that wasn't the school he was in, and nobody else had any openings. I took a deep breath and made the switch.
For a long time, I worried, as Donna did, that Aidan might be missing out by not being in the public school. I quizzed my friends whose children were in seventh grade about what their kids were doing in math, social studies, English, and science to see if I could pinpoint anything that Aidan was missing. I worried, too, that by “letting” him act out in school instead of making him “sit up and fly right,” as my father would have put it, I might be doing Aidan a disservice. We all have to go to school, learn how to get along with others, and put up with supervisors who bore us. Was I spoiling Aidan by pulling him out of the public school? Would he emerge uneducated and unprepared for the so-called “real world?” because he was now going to a crazy school where the kids call the teachers by their first names, wear slippers to class, and can eat snack whenever they want?
Fast forward six months. It is nearly summer, and for their culminating event, Aidan and his classmates at the Montessori School are performing Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream. On a real stage, with real costumes and lights. I'm sitting in the audience, and there is Aidan on stage as Lysander, holding hands with Hermia. Aidan is wearing a tunic and tights. He is saying his lines. He is not the best actor on stage, but he's into it, waving his hands around and managing to lie still with his eyes closed while Puck dances wildly around his head.
If you had asked me what I wanted Aidan to learn during his first year of middle school, I would have said math, science, social studies, and maybe how to write a book review. I would never have predicted that Aidan would create, as he did at this school, a model of a half-size camel, which he presented while spouting facts about the desert biome. I never would have predicted how much Aidan loved volunteering with senior citizens, as his middle school does once each week. And I certainly never could have imagined the stories I heard about how, during the middle school field trip backpacking in the White Mountains, Aidan stood up as the moon was rising and started reciting lines from Midsummer Night's Dream.
Did my son learn math at his new school, Donna? Oh yes. He studied language arts and geography, current events and science, too.
But what Aidan really learned was much more important than any of that: His new Montessori school gave Aidan the confidence to be creative and joyful, to ask questions and seek the answers himself. As his teacher wrote in her final progress report, Aidan “embraced learning to understand, rather than studying to get a specific grade on a test.”
And that, to me, is a real education.

If No Child is Left Behind, Where Was Mine?

By the second week of middle school, I had to crowbar my son Aidan onto the school bus. The classes were boring, he said. The teachers spent a lot of time yelling. All they did was worksheets and tests. “I thought middle school would be more interesting than elementary school,” he fumed, “but it's way worse.”
I kept battling, bribing and threatening to get him out the door. My two older children had gone to the same public school, which draws students from three towns and has a good reputation. They were in college now. Why couldn't Aidan settle in? What was different?
Everything. The No Child Left Behind Act, signed into law in 2002 when Aidan was halfway through kindergarten, has turned the public school curriculum on its ear. This legislation requires public schools to administer standardized tests annually to all students. Where there was once time in the school day for projects and performances, there are now stacks of worksheets. Schools are expected to make yearly progress in upping student achievement scores, so teachers teach to the tests.
I was once in favor of this Act. Who doesn't want to see schools held accountable? But now I've changed my mind. Sure, the test scores might be rising, but at what cost?
Aidan – a bright, quirky kid identified for our regional gifted program in fourth grade, balked at many of his elementary school assignments and started sliding fast in middle school. Every Sunday morning, he'd moan about having to go to school on Monday. “The only time school is fun is when I'm getting into trouble,” he mumbled one night.
Uh oh, I thought. I'm losing him.
I met with his teachers. They noted Aidan's lack of focus and danced around the topic of medication for attention issues.
“He's getting A's and B's,” I pointed out. “He earns advanced scores on the MCAS tests.”
Meanwhile, Aidan was getting mouthier and meaner at home. He was withdrawing into his computer. When his dad and I complained about his attitude and threatened to take away the computer, he shrugged. “My life is over anyway,” he said. “I'm already dead at school.”
One afternoon, I noticed the sign for a Montessori school tucked between a couple of brick buildings in a nearby town. On a whim, Aidan and I went inside and talked to the head of school. She invited Aidan to spend a day with them.
The Montessori middle school classroom was nothing like the ones in his public school. There was a carpet and the walls were painted a soothing periwinkle blue. The windows were enormous. The kids called the teachers by their first names. In public school, Aidan switched classes every 55 minutes. At Montessori, group instruction was kept to a minimum and students were expected to organize their own schedules. Grades were almost nonexistent and students didn't have to take MCAS tests. Middle school kids still got an hour of recess.
After his first day at Montessori, Aidan came home puzzled but smiling. “I don't know what this is, Mom, but it doesn't feel like school,” he said. “The teachers aren't really like teachers. They're just people who want to help you learn.”
His dad and I spent a weekend thinking about this. We were on the fence about Montessori for two main reasons: 1) we worried that Aidan might just drift through Montessori's free-wheeling, creative curriculum without having to really learn anything; and 2) we felt like traitors and failures because our kid couldn't make it in public school.
I went online and looked up articles on Montessori. One of the most helpful was by Emily Bazelon in Slate on the eve of Montessori's 100th anniversary, at http://www.slate.com/id/2166489/pagenum/2. The Montssori teacher's site was also useful, at http://www.montessori-namta.org/namta/geninfo/whatismont.html. I discovered that Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page credited their Montessori school educations for their development as creative, self-directed individuals at http://www.michaelolaf.net/google.html.
We agreed to let Aidan switch to the Montessori school and waited for the other shoe to drop. Surely he would hang out with friends from his public school and beg to go back.
That didn't happen. In fact, each day Aidan was happier than the day before. He was excited about doing a project on the history of batteries. He started spouting facts about camels as he researched desert biomes. He began taking time on homework assignments. He respected his teachers and they respected him. No more yelling, in class or out, and no more resistance to going to school.
At the end of the second week, I picked Aidan up early from school for a doctor's appointment. When I entered his Montessori classroom, I saw two middle school students lying on the floor, quietly reading. A few children were gathered around the computers. One teacher was holding a writing conference with four students at a small table. Aidan and another boy were working on math puzzles. Music played in the background. There was the blissful hum of concentrated activity.
“You seem awfully relaxed,” I noted as we walked out to the car.
“I am,” Aidan said. “Maybe it's because at Montessori they let you do math in your socks.”
I thought about this, and decided that if I had to do algebra, I'd rather do it in my socks, too.
I left the Montessori school thinking about the students seated in rows at our public school, diligently taking multiple choice tests, memorizing the names of explorers, and studying pictures of rocks and plant cells. Our public school teachers work hard to do their jobs, and students work hard to do theirs. Somehow, though, we have managed to make factories out of our schools and drain all joy out of learning.
It was well-meaning legislation, but the No Child Left Behind Act has handcuffed our public school teachers and stripped the natural curiosity and passion that all children have for learning. There should be no child left behind, yet mine nearly was.