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Monday: school!
Apr. 22nd, 2024 03:06 pmM and W are school days this week. It _would_ have been a 5 day week, except RavenCon. I will need to pack for that. Soon.
Anyway.
I walked with M.
Yesterday, between dinner at Less Than Greater Than and a 3 mile walk with R. and a 1 mile loop after dinner, I got a lot of what I’ve been mulling out of my head. I’m going to _try_ to get it down in the blog here, but it is huge an amorphous and breaking it up into pieces is proving very challenging. Every time I think I have an idea for how to turn it into action items / a solution (instead of just me whining about how everyone is Doing It Wrong and Dangerously So), I run up against another component of the problem.
Come on everybody, here we go! This’ll be long. You’ve been warned.
My daughter did not adapt to high school well at all. This is a thing that can happen and I was aware of that. I had been through this transition with my son, but there were a lot of important differences. First, his 9th grade year was the first year back after the beginning of the pandemic (A. did all year virtual, but he wanted to go back so he did). He had been in CASE through 7th grade and came back into district for part of one year in junior high. That transition was great, because it was from CASE to STEP and very, very similar, and with a teacher he had some familiarity with.
Going to high school, he was in ODP/PACE, again, kinda like CASE or STEP in that it is separated classroom for core subjects and then inclusion. Because he did well in inclusion, they increased the demands over time and he did will with that, until he hit this year, and turned out to be eligible to graduate and was accepted by Fitchburg State. He was NOT accepted by Westfield, because his inclusion classes in ninth grade were not recognized as meeting college prep standard (if you’re thinking, but his later years did, sooo… well, you’re not wrong). T.’s experience was one of very low demand that increased over time, always very attuned to what worked for him.
A.’s experience was different. Also on an IEP, but never in CASE or STEP, always resource room based programs with lots of services and accommodations and lots of meltdowns. Lots of meltdowns. Super engaged learner, but so many meltdowns. High school was a series of, swap classes around (this made things worse, because she wound up with a problematic history teacher), remove a class (Spanish), and escalating symptoms that were baffling and might have been but turned out to not be neurological in nature.
I pulled her out after the vice principal misunderstood something badly enough to be making false accusations and threatening disciplinary action (for something that no one said had occurred, in a context in which she was arguably the victim of the other party). I had been participating in the process of trying to help A. meet the demands of her school context, and had hit a point where that was clearly an error and it was now a matter of what to do instead, once we figured out the neurological piece. Since it wasn’t neurological, and A. and R. did not like my solution of leave her in school until she turned 16 but remove all demands, we went with Fusion. Fusion seems to be working and does a whole bunch of things right that we really struggled with at AB.
First, and probably most important, when A. has a question about the material, she can get an answer immediately. Second, and probably almost as important, during class time she does not have to deal with multiple people talking at once. She is still dealing with multiple people talking during Homework Cafe, but it does not appear to be a problem there. The one on one model drastically reduces the frustration of an engaged learner who doesn’t understand the material being presented.
Third, all homework is done on site, with school supervision. That instantly creates really good school-life balance — school stays at school. And parents don’t have to puzzle out what was wanted and motivate the student to do it.
Fourth, school starts much later. There’s a ton of flexibility here, but basically, she needs to be a 35ish minute drive away by 10:30. This is a wild improvement over needing to be a 5ish minute drive away by 8 am. True, she’s generally done at 4:30, but she often wanted a snack when she got home anyway, and this way, she just goes home and has dinner right away and has the rest of the evening to do anything at all that she likes, as long as she picks out her outfit for the next day and takes a shower if she’s going to do that.
She has restarted Spanish, and is moving through the material rapidly, and able to do the assignments with a high degree of accuracy. I’m seeing improvement as well, so it definitely sounds like she’s learning. In her English class, she’s working on Romeo and Juliet, and I can see that she is absorbing that material as well. I can tell that the Dance instructor is engaging in a careful and complex assessment process with A., preparatory to working with her on larger movements, with a variety of goals including improving her proprioception. It’s early days, but there is a lot of evidence that learning is occurring in this context.
Finally, all students at the school have lunch at 12:30, and that is when clubs and socializing happens. So the school is supporting meaningful, in person socializing on a daily basis (except weekends, obviously). She has mentioned playing Uno, having conversations and participating in cooking club, as well as playing “basketball” (indoor, small hoop). The baffling symptoms have disappeared. Other than one meltdown on her first day, there have been no subsequent meltdowns. Transitions (getting ready to leave the house for any purpose) no longer generate panic attacks and meltdowns. She smiles, sometimes hums or sings to herself, and is generally in a much better mood.
It is _uncanny_ how well this has worked out.
Obviously, we’re not going to be switching all schools to this model any time soon. Fusion is ludicrously expensive, and it is not clear how you could implement this approach on a large scale basis. How ludicrously expensive?
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/here-are-the-15-most-expensive-high-schools-in-america
Fusion is not on this list, because Fusion charges per course ($5K +/-).
“A typical student can meet graduation requirements in four years of high school with 12 classes per year”
Which means that at the low end, Fusion is coming in at the high end of that list of 15 Most Expensive High Schools in America, and there’s a ton of fun stuff that you can take over and above the minimum to graduate and they also cost money. Currently, there’s a Braintree case involving a special ed student who was tuitioned into the Hingham Fusion, but Braintree is declining to continue that placement (I’m not taking any position here on how that should be handled). The Boston Globe characterizes tuition at Fusion as $90K/year. I’m disinclined to disagree with this characterization, because it absolutely can be that high.
You can also see why I made no effort whatsoever to get A. tuitioned in by ABRSD.
I do know people who have successfully had their child tuitioned into another one-to-one school (Brightmont, one of the Washington locations). And I certainly know a lot of kids who are tuitioned into various special ed schools around Massachusetts (more than one at The Guild, for example). I have a college friend whose son benefitted from being parent-placed into Fusion in Seattle, which is one of the reasons I was betting this would work out for A. We had the benefit of really detailed answers to a lot of our questions, from someone who had direct, recent experience with Fusion, whose children we know, whose parenting style we respect, and whose judgment we trust completely.
So why do I say it is uncanny how well this is going? Well, mostly because there are some pretty obvious aspects of what works well at Fusion that could probably be implemented at most public schools, with minimal if any cost.
First, all independent work to be done _on school grounds_ with _school supervision_. And if that means you have to reduce something elsewhere, do it. I will come back to that.
Second, longer passing times. Fusion is entirely on one floor and is quite small, and they have 10 minutes (from the 20 to the 30) between classes/homework cafe/lunch/wtf. This was a huge stressor for A., and I suspect for a lot of other students as well.
Third, longer lunch. Fusion has a one hour lunch; AB had a 35 minute lunch.
This _might_ translate into a longer school day or a longer calendar year (Fusion has a longer calendar year, and fewer breaks), which in turn might increase costs in a variety of ways, which is why I say these changes would have minimal if any cost to implement. Generally speaking, if you work really hard to pack a ton of stuff into given amount of time, you start having costs that can disappear if you ease up on how much you are trying to get done. These costs can include problems like attrition, difficulty recruiting, absenteeism, increased discipline problems, and other compliance costs. But in a school setting, with FAPE and other federal requirements, if you put enough stress into the environment, you can also wind up with a larger fraction of the student body requiring accommodations _that would be less necessary or entirely unnecessary in a less stressful environment_.
This next bit is about homework, and it’s not a “bit”. It’s a lot.
People mean different things when they say “homework”. The assumption is that homework is work that is done by one student on their own behalf (we use words like “cheating” if someone else is helping them do it, other than to create a supportive environment, or if someone just does it for them); to practice a technique that has been presented to them so that they can later demonstrate competence on an assessment (test, quiz, whatever). Finally, the word “home” suggests that it is not being done during class time.
Flipped classrooms send the “lecture” home with the student to watch at home or “not during class time”, and then provide support in the classroom while the students do “homework” to practice the technique presented in the “lecture” that they watched at home.
Some, but not all, classes _also_ require students to do independent work of a similar nature during the class time.
So many things to say here.
Why would we let schools have our kids for 6+ hours a day, five days a week _and also_ intrude on their time with us at home _and also_ require us to provide support in getting that work-at-home done (supervise, motivate, create environment for, etc.)? If you search on work-life balance k-12, you see a lot of stuff about the poor teachers’ work-life balance. What about the students. What about the parents. And also, you would _think_ that the teachers who are also simultaneously parents would push back on this, but it’s just not clear that happens either. We’re teaching kids by example to agree to labor law violations. Kids aren’t getting paid for their schoolwork, either, which raises a lot of questions in my mind about how this isn’t some kind of labor law violation on the kids anyway. If you’re thinking, yeah, but this is the way it has always been done, you are definitely wrong. And that says so much about the quality of education, that people are walking around this ignorant, which further means that it’s not even effective at educating so honestly why fucking bother. If you’re thinking, but that’s the way everyone does it, again, _not true_ and, again, a sign of how terrible education is that people honestly believe this crap when we all have smartphones so we all have the internet so we could fucking look this up and learn otherwise in all of maybe 2 minutes. (Left as an exercise for the reader, but if you are struggling, try expat school germany or something along those lines. Once you start reading about how school works in other countries, you start to realize that These Are Choices We Are Making and we could be making different ones.)
Where was I?
Right. If the kiddos do the independent work in the classroom, you get a couple of benefits right away. First, you have a small chance of actually stopping people from doing other people’s work, which is not nothing. Supposedly, the independent work is supposed to be independent, and done by each of the kiddos. NOT one person doing everyone’s work. You send that shit off campus, and you no longer have any idea about who did it. Second, you have a really decent chance of figuring out that no one actually has any idea how to do the work, and correcting that problem on the spot (see: Flipped Classroom above). Like, actual learning could maybe happen. Now, you might think, whatever, I’ll catch the cheaters at the assessment. Oh, you sweet summer child. Next.
I DO RECOGNIZE THAT SOME PARENTS DEMAND HIGH VOLUMES OF HOMEWORK. I get it. If you post something in the comments here about the importance of lots of homework, and how blah blah blah I will just delete it so don’t waste either of our time I am not interested.
One of the biggest problems with school in general is the work-life balance problem, and it has become abundantly clear to me in this process that I had completely failed to understand how workaholism functions. I had this crazy idea that people scrambled up ladders to success and had so normalized climbing ladder that they kinda didn’t know how to relax and enjoy their attainment. But that’s not what’s going on at all. What’s going on is that people are working themselves so hard that they are emotionally drained, which prevents them from feeling their trauma and horrible aching isolation and emptiness. That’s why they don’t take vacation. That’s why they don’t retire. That’s why they unretire (if they don’t die as soon as they retire). There is a dark cauldron, an abyss, if you will, of unmet social and emotional needs inside them and if they had any spare energy, they would _feel_ all that and it would be soul-destroying.
The solution here is NOT to participate in inflicting this on their kids. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, because an awful lot of therapists remain focused on helping people adapt to their situation, rather than recognizing that their situation is horrible and helping them find a path to a better one.
I worked at a couple startups, one of which was a “real” startup, in the sense that I was there very early and it had very demanding hours and was extremely exhausting. I chose to do that, because in many respects the rest of my life was an absolute disaster that I did not know how to improve. But I could work, and the idea of getting to do something I was quite good at, _at a bookstore_, for decent money seemed like it was a great place to put all my time and energy. When I could, I quit, and my initial plan was to catch up on sleep (and drinking! LOL) and after that, I wanted to actually go fix all those broken parts of myself that I had put on hold while I worked insane hours. _I didn’t want to just keep being all messed up and then doing that to my kids._ Specifically, I didn’t want to have kids if I didn’t figure at least a lot of it out first.
I will thus leave largely unaddressed the problem of How to Fix the Parents Who Demand High Demand Schools. I’m sorry. You’re on your own for now.
Engaging _only_ with the parents who are just trying to comply with a Fucked Up system that demands way too many hours of time from our kids and their parents, why are parents not pushing back harder?
I mean, sure, for a long time there was this sense that you have to work super hard to get into a good school because there aren’t enough Good Jobs and this is the only path to a Good Life. That was, in its own way, utter bullshit, but it isn’t even true any more. There are plenty of jobs and increasingly they don’t require you to go to a “good college” or really any college at all. (I have a whole theory about how the supply / demand balance has changed so that the people in short supply now are the people who Touch the Stuff — the plumbers and cosmetologists and HVAC and so forth types — whose rates have been steadily increasing while the people who went to “good college” are terrified of AI replacing them.)
I suspect, however, that there are some technical issues.
Anyone who did manage to go through The System (did the homework got into the college did the homework graduated did the professional degree got the credential yada yada yada) had to have _some_ kind of time management skill. In the past, that was stuff like a rolodex or phone book, a desk calendar or planner, stuff like that. Then we had a period of Newton / Palm Pilot / PDA. And now we have washed up on the shores of smartphones, where as near as I can tell we have collectively forgotten that one of the parents of the smartphone was the PDA and we have a lot of people engaging in endless social media scrolling who have apparently no idea how to use any of the Focus features or alarms or calendar alerts or whatever.
But even people who _do_ actually have online/digital/wtf calendars and similar tools _often have one for work_. You don’t really want to put all your personal stuff into your work calendar (and lose it when you are laid off, or have to deal with snoopy IT / people with admin privileges). So maybe you also have some other calendar. But unless you have some Skillz, you probably aren’t doing a great job juggling your work calendar system, your personal calendar system, and whatever your Family calendar system is. The result is complex and very unpretty. You spend a lot of time on a daily and weekly basis trying to keep the various systems synchronized for yourself, your children and possibly your less capable other adult(s). Worse, you don’t necessarily realize just how wildly overcommitted you and every other member of your family is, because the commitments are fragmented across multiple systems.
You experience the overcommitment. But you can’t _see_ the overcommitment.
If people _could see_ the overcommitment, all of it in one place, I suspect more of them would push back more consistently.
Now, you might say, but walkitout, look how long it took you to pull your daughter out. That’s sort of true. But until this year, the homework time wasn’t really that bad, and a fair amount of it was either dealt with at school, or silently never done either via accommodation or worse grades. I don’t give a fuck about grades, other than not having to repeat classes, so it really wasn’t until this year’s second history teacher that I put any really organized, committed effort into having A. “do” her “homework”, and by which I mean, made her show me the homework so that we could get through it together. Anything she could do readily, she did; anything else, I did until she felt like she could carry on and then she did. Once I was actually doing the work, it really became apparent just how bad the curricula was — extremely low-quality photocopied math worksheets (as in, hard to read the numbers and symbols unambigously), extremely low-quality photographed reading material and short answer questions for history, sometimes with the photographed reading material in the LMS rotated 90 degrees so it was extra hard to read unless you downloaded the photo and rotated it in an editor. Also, the questions were often poorly calibrated to the reading (they would ask for specific details that were not present in the reading, and honestly, if you are just gonna go read the wikipedia entry anyway, why bother with the fucking reading).
Basically, I was able to manage this insane system up until A. got to high school via straightforward passive resistance. That broke down.
There’s plenty of rhetoric out there about parents who don’t blah blah blah the way the teachers / school / randos want them to. Set up a quiet, supportive environment for doing homework, etc. Assign a set time to do the work. Make sure there are no distractions. Etc. This kind of rhetoric is absolutely missing the point. I went looking specifically for advice on how to synchronize / reconcile various calendars (multiple school calendars, multiple work calendars, home calendar), and the advice was basically the usual: whoever is stupid enough to go ask for help doing this is assigned the task of iteratively trying paper, whiteboard, digital or all of the above, and cajoling the rest of the family into reliably participating in the process, which inevitably involves at least a half hour weekly meeting on Sunday afternoon.
I just want to say here. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
When is everyone just going to say enough.
I stopped briefly here, and did some light corrections (I can’t call it editing; this thing is a Hot Mess and it is going to stay that way, because this is just a draft Brain Dump so I can decompose it and create a bunch of short videos on these topics). And to catch my breath before I started in on the Real Problem, which is stimulants.
I’ve always known people who were taking ADHD meds (stimulants) and come on, I’ve been drinking coffee / tea or cocoa every day of my life since I was maybe 8. Probably younger, honestly. (Before you express shock, I was also drinking alcohol from about age 2, so, take these things in order of importance, okay? The alcohol, at least, wasn’t daily.) I’m not here to judge you for your stimulants. What I _am_ here is to Express Concern / Pearl Clutch over the fact that more people are taking prescription stimulants _now_, proportional to population, than ever before in the history of the country.
Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. _After_ you’ve collected the statistics to prove me wrong. I won’t wait, because you won’t be coming back.
I learned this because I settled down to play my game (Farm Ville 2: Country Escape, and I would imagine that someone out there thinks I’m joking, but as long as we are here to talk about Climbing Ladder, they _finally_ added level 300 and above, which is deeply exciting. Am I serious? How could you even tell? If you can answer that question, DM or email me because I’m interested myself.) and listen to Odd Lots and it was the episode with Danielle Carr. I went and read all the essays over at Pioneer Works by her and others and honestly, I had a lot of feelings. I think the most important feeling was, hey, this explains everything that I’m hearing from the family that I’ve been vacationing with recently. Still haven’t figured out how to frame sharing that observation with them, altho I clearly will have to.
Then I started having questions. So. Many. Questions.
Like, how many people on staff at AB are taking prescription stimulants? How many students? How many parents of students? I couldn’t figure out how the place got so deranged so fast, but let me tell you, if everyone signed up with Cerebral or Done or whatever during the pandemic change in rules regarding schedule 2 prescriptions, that would explain so much.
As near as I can tell, this is how stimulants work. You’re tired. But you’ve decided that you really shouldn’t rest or sleep yet / ever. So you take some kind of substance that keeps you awake. You’re not rested. Your brain doesn’t work super good, and you’re prone to particular patterns of behavior that are extremely NOT good. But as long as what you need to do is kind of repetitive and doesn’t demand careful thinking or sensitivity to small changes, you can probably mostly do it. At some point, you decide you can finally rest or sleep, and hopefully, you’ll be able to do that. You’ll sleep a lot, partly because you’re way behind (sleep debt) and partly because of the effects of the drug.
If you just do this once, it’s like, sleep the clock round and you’re mostly fine. But if you do this On the Regular — take this substance so you can stay awake when you would otherwise be sleeping or not doing much of anything at all — homeostasis will kick in. Whatever that drug connects to inside your body — adenosine receptor or whatever, depending on whether you took vivarin or ritalin or adderall or meth — will grow _more_ to compensate for the fact that you are taking a substance that blocks those. And then, when you _stop_ taking the substance, you now have _tons_ of that Sleepy Sleepy receptor. You sleep the clock round for a week. A fortnight. A month. Until those receptors return to baseline. And does your body even know where that is, or are you going to _stay_ at that new baseline.
Few people have the ability to sleep for a month. Ya gotta get up to pee, or eat, or pay a bill, or go to work, or reschedule an appointment that you missed or whatever. Probably what happens is you wind up taking the substance again, and trying to taper down. But remember, homeostasis. So you’re just tired all the time. Forever.
Like, I’m not kidding here. I’m not exaggerating for effect. I think this is what stimulants do to you.
There are some advanced maneuvers available. Maybe you can’t get entirely off the thing, but you -can- make it work better. If you can take a week of vacation and NOT take the thing, and sleep for the whole week, the substance will magically work _great_ again. Or maybe you can’t take time off, but you know that work is slow, then maybe you dramatically reduce your usage and snooze for the slow time, etc.
Another thing you can do is get a different stimulant. They each work a little differently, so you might notice that you can quit one, and use a different one, and it works almost as good as the first one you ever used (similar phenomenon with antihistamines and all kinds of other things. Homeostasis is Real). Maybe you figure out that if you cycle between the two at some kind of interval, things Work Better For You, but then you’ve got another problem: you might have real trouble sleeping at all. You might be really quick to anger. You might do absolutely bonkers shit.
All of this, tho, is going to teach you over and over and over again (intermittent rewards!) that you _have_ to take this stuff to function, to be alert, to stay awake, to do your job, to Be There for Life. That’s gonna make it even harder to stop.
I wasn’t taking any prescription stimulants at that startup. I _was_ drinking a fair amount of coffee and tea (and eating chocolate — let’s not leave that out!). It took a very, very long time to get the amount of caffeine I was drinking down to a reasonable level again. I can’t say based on direct experience that I have any advice for anyone taking prescription stimulants how to go about getting clear of them. And I’m really glad I don’t have any direct experience in that area. It looks pretty rough. Probably your best bet is extend time between doses, prioritize rest and sleep, and taper the dose slowly while recognizing that this _will result in being really tired and sleepy all the time_, and that does not mean it’s not working. I would personally appreciate it if you would _tell me_ that you were doing this, so that I wouldn’t sit around wondering what’s going on with you, and I could instead collaborate with you to identify effortful tasks and so forth that I could maybe do for you while you get through this process, or be an accountability partner if you want to experiment with that (I’m only signing up for the Listen to the Confession part; I don’t assign penances or keep track, so if you need that level of accountability partner it has to be someone else).
From a collective or societal level perspective, I can only assume that we are headed for one helluva crash. Maybe we’ll just give up on AI and/or crypto, and everyone involved in anything adjacent to any of that can catch up on their sleep, and then get a job helping people in the rest of the economy do the same.
Anyway.
I walked with M.
Yesterday, between dinner at Less Than Greater Than and a 3 mile walk with R. and a 1 mile loop after dinner, I got a lot of what I’ve been mulling out of my head. I’m going to _try_ to get it down in the blog here, but it is huge an amorphous and breaking it up into pieces is proving very challenging. Every time I think I have an idea for how to turn it into action items / a solution (instead of just me whining about how everyone is Doing It Wrong and Dangerously So), I run up against another component of the problem.
Come on everybody, here we go! This’ll be long. You’ve been warned.
My daughter did not adapt to high school well at all. This is a thing that can happen and I was aware of that. I had been through this transition with my son, but there were a lot of important differences. First, his 9th grade year was the first year back after the beginning of the pandemic (A. did all year virtual, but he wanted to go back so he did). He had been in CASE through 7th grade and came back into district for part of one year in junior high. That transition was great, because it was from CASE to STEP and very, very similar, and with a teacher he had some familiarity with.
Going to high school, he was in ODP/PACE, again, kinda like CASE or STEP in that it is separated classroom for core subjects and then inclusion. Because he did well in inclusion, they increased the demands over time and he did will with that, until he hit this year, and turned out to be eligible to graduate and was accepted by Fitchburg State. He was NOT accepted by Westfield, because his inclusion classes in ninth grade were not recognized as meeting college prep standard (if you’re thinking, but his later years did, sooo… well, you’re not wrong). T.’s experience was one of very low demand that increased over time, always very attuned to what worked for him.
A.’s experience was different. Also on an IEP, but never in CASE or STEP, always resource room based programs with lots of services and accommodations and lots of meltdowns. Lots of meltdowns. Super engaged learner, but so many meltdowns. High school was a series of, swap classes around (this made things worse, because she wound up with a problematic history teacher), remove a class (Spanish), and escalating symptoms that were baffling and might have been but turned out to not be neurological in nature.
I pulled her out after the vice principal misunderstood something badly enough to be making false accusations and threatening disciplinary action (for something that no one said had occurred, in a context in which she was arguably the victim of the other party). I had been participating in the process of trying to help A. meet the demands of her school context, and had hit a point where that was clearly an error and it was now a matter of what to do instead, once we figured out the neurological piece. Since it wasn’t neurological, and A. and R. did not like my solution of leave her in school until she turned 16 but remove all demands, we went with Fusion. Fusion seems to be working and does a whole bunch of things right that we really struggled with at AB.
First, and probably most important, when A. has a question about the material, she can get an answer immediately. Second, and probably almost as important, during class time she does not have to deal with multiple people talking at once. She is still dealing with multiple people talking during Homework Cafe, but it does not appear to be a problem there. The one on one model drastically reduces the frustration of an engaged learner who doesn’t understand the material being presented.
Third, all homework is done on site, with school supervision. That instantly creates really good school-life balance — school stays at school. And parents don’t have to puzzle out what was wanted and motivate the student to do it.
Fourth, school starts much later. There’s a ton of flexibility here, but basically, she needs to be a 35ish minute drive away by 10:30. This is a wild improvement over needing to be a 5ish minute drive away by 8 am. True, she’s generally done at 4:30, but she often wanted a snack when she got home anyway, and this way, she just goes home and has dinner right away and has the rest of the evening to do anything at all that she likes, as long as she picks out her outfit for the next day and takes a shower if she’s going to do that.
She has restarted Spanish, and is moving through the material rapidly, and able to do the assignments with a high degree of accuracy. I’m seeing improvement as well, so it definitely sounds like she’s learning. In her English class, she’s working on Romeo and Juliet, and I can see that she is absorbing that material as well. I can tell that the Dance instructor is engaging in a careful and complex assessment process with A., preparatory to working with her on larger movements, with a variety of goals including improving her proprioception. It’s early days, but there is a lot of evidence that learning is occurring in this context.
Finally, all students at the school have lunch at 12:30, and that is when clubs and socializing happens. So the school is supporting meaningful, in person socializing on a daily basis (except weekends, obviously). She has mentioned playing Uno, having conversations and participating in cooking club, as well as playing “basketball” (indoor, small hoop). The baffling symptoms have disappeared. Other than one meltdown on her first day, there have been no subsequent meltdowns. Transitions (getting ready to leave the house for any purpose) no longer generate panic attacks and meltdowns. She smiles, sometimes hums or sings to herself, and is generally in a much better mood.
It is _uncanny_ how well this has worked out.
Obviously, we’re not going to be switching all schools to this model any time soon. Fusion is ludicrously expensive, and it is not clear how you could implement this approach on a large scale basis. How ludicrously expensive?
https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/here-are-the-15-most-expensive-high-schools-in-america
Fusion is not on this list, because Fusion charges per course ($5K +/-).
“A typical student can meet graduation requirements in four years of high school with 12 classes per year”
Which means that at the low end, Fusion is coming in at the high end of that list of 15 Most Expensive High Schools in America, and there’s a ton of fun stuff that you can take over and above the minimum to graduate and they also cost money. Currently, there’s a Braintree case involving a special ed student who was tuitioned into the Hingham Fusion, but Braintree is declining to continue that placement (I’m not taking any position here on how that should be handled). The Boston Globe characterizes tuition at Fusion as $90K/year. I’m disinclined to disagree with this characterization, because it absolutely can be that high.
You can also see why I made no effort whatsoever to get A. tuitioned in by ABRSD.
I do know people who have successfully had their child tuitioned into another one-to-one school (Brightmont, one of the Washington locations). And I certainly know a lot of kids who are tuitioned into various special ed schools around Massachusetts (more than one at The Guild, for example). I have a college friend whose son benefitted from being parent-placed into Fusion in Seattle, which is one of the reasons I was betting this would work out for A. We had the benefit of really detailed answers to a lot of our questions, from someone who had direct, recent experience with Fusion, whose children we know, whose parenting style we respect, and whose judgment we trust completely.
So why do I say it is uncanny how well this is going? Well, mostly because there are some pretty obvious aspects of what works well at Fusion that could probably be implemented at most public schools, with minimal if any cost.
First, all independent work to be done _on school grounds_ with _school supervision_. And if that means you have to reduce something elsewhere, do it. I will come back to that.
Second, longer passing times. Fusion is entirely on one floor and is quite small, and they have 10 minutes (from the 20 to the 30) between classes/homework cafe/lunch/wtf. This was a huge stressor for A., and I suspect for a lot of other students as well.
Third, longer lunch. Fusion has a one hour lunch; AB had a 35 minute lunch.
This _might_ translate into a longer school day or a longer calendar year (Fusion has a longer calendar year, and fewer breaks), which in turn might increase costs in a variety of ways, which is why I say these changes would have minimal if any cost to implement. Generally speaking, if you work really hard to pack a ton of stuff into given amount of time, you start having costs that can disappear if you ease up on how much you are trying to get done. These costs can include problems like attrition, difficulty recruiting, absenteeism, increased discipline problems, and other compliance costs. But in a school setting, with FAPE and other federal requirements, if you put enough stress into the environment, you can also wind up with a larger fraction of the student body requiring accommodations _that would be less necessary or entirely unnecessary in a less stressful environment_.
This next bit is about homework, and it’s not a “bit”. It’s a lot.
People mean different things when they say “homework”. The assumption is that homework is work that is done by one student on their own behalf (we use words like “cheating” if someone else is helping them do it, other than to create a supportive environment, or if someone just does it for them); to practice a technique that has been presented to them so that they can later demonstrate competence on an assessment (test, quiz, whatever). Finally, the word “home” suggests that it is not being done during class time.
Flipped classrooms send the “lecture” home with the student to watch at home or “not during class time”, and then provide support in the classroom while the students do “homework” to practice the technique presented in the “lecture” that they watched at home.
Some, but not all, classes _also_ require students to do independent work of a similar nature during the class time.
So many things to say here.
Why would we let schools have our kids for 6+ hours a day, five days a week _and also_ intrude on their time with us at home _and also_ require us to provide support in getting that work-at-home done (supervise, motivate, create environment for, etc.)? If you search on work-life balance k-12, you see a lot of stuff about the poor teachers’ work-life balance. What about the students. What about the parents. And also, you would _think_ that the teachers who are also simultaneously parents would push back on this, but it’s just not clear that happens either. We’re teaching kids by example to agree to labor law violations. Kids aren’t getting paid for their schoolwork, either, which raises a lot of questions in my mind about how this isn’t some kind of labor law violation on the kids anyway. If you’re thinking, yeah, but this is the way it has always been done, you are definitely wrong. And that says so much about the quality of education, that people are walking around this ignorant, which further means that it’s not even effective at educating so honestly why fucking bother. If you’re thinking, but that’s the way everyone does it, again, _not true_ and, again, a sign of how terrible education is that people honestly believe this crap when we all have smartphones so we all have the internet so we could fucking look this up and learn otherwise in all of maybe 2 minutes. (Left as an exercise for the reader, but if you are struggling, try expat school germany or something along those lines. Once you start reading about how school works in other countries, you start to realize that These Are Choices We Are Making and we could be making different ones.)
Where was I?
Right. If the kiddos do the independent work in the classroom, you get a couple of benefits right away. First, you have a small chance of actually stopping people from doing other people’s work, which is not nothing. Supposedly, the independent work is supposed to be independent, and done by each of the kiddos. NOT one person doing everyone’s work. You send that shit off campus, and you no longer have any idea about who did it. Second, you have a really decent chance of figuring out that no one actually has any idea how to do the work, and correcting that problem on the spot (see: Flipped Classroom above). Like, actual learning could maybe happen. Now, you might think, whatever, I’ll catch the cheaters at the assessment. Oh, you sweet summer child. Next.
I DO RECOGNIZE THAT SOME PARENTS DEMAND HIGH VOLUMES OF HOMEWORK. I get it. If you post something in the comments here about the importance of lots of homework, and how blah blah blah I will just delete it so don’t waste either of our time I am not interested.
One of the biggest problems with school in general is the work-life balance problem, and it has become abundantly clear to me in this process that I had completely failed to understand how workaholism functions. I had this crazy idea that people scrambled up ladders to success and had so normalized climbing ladder that they kinda didn’t know how to relax and enjoy their attainment. But that’s not what’s going on at all. What’s going on is that people are working themselves so hard that they are emotionally drained, which prevents them from feeling their trauma and horrible aching isolation and emptiness. That’s why they don’t take vacation. That’s why they don’t retire. That’s why they unretire (if they don’t die as soon as they retire). There is a dark cauldron, an abyss, if you will, of unmet social and emotional needs inside them and if they had any spare energy, they would _feel_ all that and it would be soul-destroying.
The solution here is NOT to participate in inflicting this on their kids. I honestly don’t know what the solution is, because an awful lot of therapists remain focused on helping people adapt to their situation, rather than recognizing that their situation is horrible and helping them find a path to a better one.
I worked at a couple startups, one of which was a “real” startup, in the sense that I was there very early and it had very demanding hours and was extremely exhausting. I chose to do that, because in many respects the rest of my life was an absolute disaster that I did not know how to improve. But I could work, and the idea of getting to do something I was quite good at, _at a bookstore_, for decent money seemed like it was a great place to put all my time and energy. When I could, I quit, and my initial plan was to catch up on sleep (and drinking! LOL) and after that, I wanted to actually go fix all those broken parts of myself that I had put on hold while I worked insane hours. _I didn’t want to just keep being all messed up and then doing that to my kids._ Specifically, I didn’t want to have kids if I didn’t figure at least a lot of it out first.
I will thus leave largely unaddressed the problem of How to Fix the Parents Who Demand High Demand Schools. I’m sorry. You’re on your own for now.
Engaging _only_ with the parents who are just trying to comply with a Fucked Up system that demands way too many hours of time from our kids and their parents, why are parents not pushing back harder?
I mean, sure, for a long time there was this sense that you have to work super hard to get into a good school because there aren’t enough Good Jobs and this is the only path to a Good Life. That was, in its own way, utter bullshit, but it isn’t even true any more. There are plenty of jobs and increasingly they don’t require you to go to a “good college” or really any college at all. (I have a whole theory about how the supply / demand balance has changed so that the people in short supply now are the people who Touch the Stuff — the plumbers and cosmetologists and HVAC and so forth types — whose rates have been steadily increasing while the people who went to “good college” are terrified of AI replacing them.)
I suspect, however, that there are some technical issues.
Anyone who did manage to go through The System (did the homework got into the college did the homework graduated did the professional degree got the credential yada yada yada) had to have _some_ kind of time management skill. In the past, that was stuff like a rolodex or phone book, a desk calendar or planner, stuff like that. Then we had a period of Newton / Palm Pilot / PDA. And now we have washed up on the shores of smartphones, where as near as I can tell we have collectively forgotten that one of the parents of the smartphone was the PDA and we have a lot of people engaging in endless social media scrolling who have apparently no idea how to use any of the Focus features or alarms or calendar alerts or whatever.
But even people who _do_ actually have online/digital/wtf calendars and similar tools _often have one for work_. You don’t really want to put all your personal stuff into your work calendar (and lose it when you are laid off, or have to deal with snoopy IT / people with admin privileges). So maybe you also have some other calendar. But unless you have some Skillz, you probably aren’t doing a great job juggling your work calendar system, your personal calendar system, and whatever your Family calendar system is. The result is complex and very unpretty. You spend a lot of time on a daily and weekly basis trying to keep the various systems synchronized for yourself, your children and possibly your less capable other adult(s). Worse, you don’t necessarily realize just how wildly overcommitted you and every other member of your family is, because the commitments are fragmented across multiple systems.
You experience the overcommitment. But you can’t _see_ the overcommitment.
If people _could see_ the overcommitment, all of it in one place, I suspect more of them would push back more consistently.
Now, you might say, but walkitout, look how long it took you to pull your daughter out. That’s sort of true. But until this year, the homework time wasn’t really that bad, and a fair amount of it was either dealt with at school, or silently never done either via accommodation or worse grades. I don’t give a fuck about grades, other than not having to repeat classes, so it really wasn’t until this year’s second history teacher that I put any really organized, committed effort into having A. “do” her “homework”, and by which I mean, made her show me the homework so that we could get through it together. Anything she could do readily, she did; anything else, I did until she felt like she could carry on and then she did. Once I was actually doing the work, it really became apparent just how bad the curricula was — extremely low-quality photocopied math worksheets (as in, hard to read the numbers and symbols unambigously), extremely low-quality photographed reading material and short answer questions for history, sometimes with the photographed reading material in the LMS rotated 90 degrees so it was extra hard to read unless you downloaded the photo and rotated it in an editor. Also, the questions were often poorly calibrated to the reading (they would ask for specific details that were not present in the reading, and honestly, if you are just gonna go read the wikipedia entry anyway, why bother with the fucking reading).
Basically, I was able to manage this insane system up until A. got to high school via straightforward passive resistance. That broke down.
There’s plenty of rhetoric out there about parents who don’t blah blah blah the way the teachers / school / randos want them to. Set up a quiet, supportive environment for doing homework, etc. Assign a set time to do the work. Make sure there are no distractions. Etc. This kind of rhetoric is absolutely missing the point. I went looking specifically for advice on how to synchronize / reconcile various calendars (multiple school calendars, multiple work calendars, home calendar), and the advice was basically the usual: whoever is stupid enough to go ask for help doing this is assigned the task of iteratively trying paper, whiteboard, digital or all of the above, and cajoling the rest of the family into reliably participating in the process, which inevitably involves at least a half hour weekly meeting on Sunday afternoon.
I just want to say here. What. The. Actual. Fuck.
When is everyone just going to say enough.
I stopped briefly here, and did some light corrections (I can’t call it editing; this thing is a Hot Mess and it is going to stay that way, because this is just a draft Brain Dump so I can decompose it and create a bunch of short videos on these topics). And to catch my breath before I started in on the Real Problem, which is stimulants.
I’ve always known people who were taking ADHD meds (stimulants) and come on, I’ve been drinking coffee / tea or cocoa every day of my life since I was maybe 8. Probably younger, honestly. (Before you express shock, I was also drinking alcohol from about age 2, so, take these things in order of importance, okay? The alcohol, at least, wasn’t daily.) I’m not here to judge you for your stimulants. What I _am_ here is to Express Concern / Pearl Clutch over the fact that more people are taking prescription stimulants _now_, proportional to population, than ever before in the history of the country.
Go ahead. Tell me I’m wrong. _After_ you’ve collected the statistics to prove me wrong. I won’t wait, because you won’t be coming back.
I learned this because I settled down to play my game (Farm Ville 2: Country Escape, and I would imagine that someone out there thinks I’m joking, but as long as we are here to talk about Climbing Ladder, they _finally_ added level 300 and above, which is deeply exciting. Am I serious? How could you even tell? If you can answer that question, DM or email me because I’m interested myself.) and listen to Odd Lots and it was the episode with Danielle Carr. I went and read all the essays over at Pioneer Works by her and others and honestly, I had a lot of feelings. I think the most important feeling was, hey, this explains everything that I’m hearing from the family that I’ve been vacationing with recently. Still haven’t figured out how to frame sharing that observation with them, altho I clearly will have to.
Then I started having questions. So. Many. Questions.
Like, how many people on staff at AB are taking prescription stimulants? How many students? How many parents of students? I couldn’t figure out how the place got so deranged so fast, but let me tell you, if everyone signed up with Cerebral or Done or whatever during the pandemic change in rules regarding schedule 2 prescriptions, that would explain so much.
As near as I can tell, this is how stimulants work. You’re tired. But you’ve decided that you really shouldn’t rest or sleep yet / ever. So you take some kind of substance that keeps you awake. You’re not rested. Your brain doesn’t work super good, and you’re prone to particular patterns of behavior that are extremely NOT good. But as long as what you need to do is kind of repetitive and doesn’t demand careful thinking or sensitivity to small changes, you can probably mostly do it. At some point, you decide you can finally rest or sleep, and hopefully, you’ll be able to do that. You’ll sleep a lot, partly because you’re way behind (sleep debt) and partly because of the effects of the drug.
If you just do this once, it’s like, sleep the clock round and you’re mostly fine. But if you do this On the Regular — take this substance so you can stay awake when you would otherwise be sleeping or not doing much of anything at all — homeostasis will kick in. Whatever that drug connects to inside your body — adenosine receptor or whatever, depending on whether you took vivarin or ritalin or adderall or meth — will grow _more_ to compensate for the fact that you are taking a substance that blocks those. And then, when you _stop_ taking the substance, you now have _tons_ of that Sleepy Sleepy receptor. You sleep the clock round for a week. A fortnight. A month. Until those receptors return to baseline. And does your body even know where that is, or are you going to _stay_ at that new baseline.
Few people have the ability to sleep for a month. Ya gotta get up to pee, or eat, or pay a bill, or go to work, or reschedule an appointment that you missed or whatever. Probably what happens is you wind up taking the substance again, and trying to taper down. But remember, homeostasis. So you’re just tired all the time. Forever.
Like, I’m not kidding here. I’m not exaggerating for effect. I think this is what stimulants do to you.
There are some advanced maneuvers available. Maybe you can’t get entirely off the thing, but you -can- make it work better. If you can take a week of vacation and NOT take the thing, and sleep for the whole week, the substance will magically work _great_ again. Or maybe you can’t take time off, but you know that work is slow, then maybe you dramatically reduce your usage and snooze for the slow time, etc.
Another thing you can do is get a different stimulant. They each work a little differently, so you might notice that you can quit one, and use a different one, and it works almost as good as the first one you ever used (similar phenomenon with antihistamines and all kinds of other things. Homeostasis is Real). Maybe you figure out that if you cycle between the two at some kind of interval, things Work Better For You, but then you’ve got another problem: you might have real trouble sleeping at all. You might be really quick to anger. You might do absolutely bonkers shit.
All of this, tho, is going to teach you over and over and over again (intermittent rewards!) that you _have_ to take this stuff to function, to be alert, to stay awake, to do your job, to Be There for Life. That’s gonna make it even harder to stop.
I wasn’t taking any prescription stimulants at that startup. I _was_ drinking a fair amount of coffee and tea (and eating chocolate — let’s not leave that out!). It took a very, very long time to get the amount of caffeine I was drinking down to a reasonable level again. I can’t say based on direct experience that I have any advice for anyone taking prescription stimulants how to go about getting clear of them. And I’m really glad I don’t have any direct experience in that area. It looks pretty rough. Probably your best bet is extend time between doses, prioritize rest and sleep, and taper the dose slowly while recognizing that this _will result in being really tired and sleepy all the time_, and that does not mean it’s not working. I would personally appreciate it if you would _tell me_ that you were doing this, so that I wouldn’t sit around wondering what’s going on with you, and I could instead collaborate with you to identify effortful tasks and so forth that I could maybe do for you while you get through this process, or be an accountability partner if you want to experiment with that (I’m only signing up for the Listen to the Confession part; I don’t assign penances or keep track, so if you need that level of accountability partner it has to be someone else).
From a collective or societal level perspective, I can only assume that we are headed for one helluva crash. Maybe we’ll just give up on AI and/or crypto, and everyone involved in anything adjacent to any of that can catch up on their sleep, and then get a job helping people in the rest of the economy do the same.