Muddy's Blog

Approximately ten years ago, we changed the Pike mission statement, “The Pike School seeks to develop in its students a life-long love of learning, respect for others, the joy of physical activity and a creative spirit” by replacing the “in its students” with “within its community.” The reason for that change was that we believed all members of our community were working on those traits. Two recent events highlighted that commitment.

Two weeks ago, our Lower School Learning Specialist, Trish Faro, gave a presentation to the Lower School faculty entitled “ELL Learners: Language Difference or Language Disorder?” She began by citing some interesting statistics: according to the 2010 U.S. Census, during the first decade of this century, the Hispanic population increased by 43% and the Asian population also grew by 43%, while the non-Hispanic white population grew by 5.7%. Another fascinating fact was that 30% of the children in our Lower School today speak and/or hear another language at home. Those languages include Greek, Hindi, Tamil, Chinese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, German, Korean, Kikulu, Telugu, Gujarati, Japanese, and Polish–quite a remarkable list. The point of the presentation was that as educators we need to be aware of this changing landscape and work to understand what these developments mean for our teaching. I will not try to give a thorough summary of Trish’s presentation, but she raised many fascinating questions and started a dialogue about where we might go from here. She cited research to show that we must be thoughtful about what and how we teach these children, for if we are not, it can have a negative impact on their fluency in both languages. As a result of the presentation, the faculty are keen to better understand this issue. Trish did suggest a few next steps, such as:
• Becoming better able to assess whether a child’s delay in language is due to an ELL issue or a true language disorder
• Formulating strategies to use in the classroom to increase an ELL child’s knowledge and confidence in English
• Accumulating websites to develop English vocabulary and enhance the child’s native language
• Setting up a lending library for children’s use in the Lower School with books written in other languages
We plan to have Trish present her findings to the Middle and Upper School faculties to help them be better aware of these important ideas. As a school, we want to be sure we understand the unique needs of each child so we can best meet his or her needs.

Another example of adult life-long learning was the half day of training the Administrative Team received from Christine Savini of Diversity Directions about effective hiring practices. I have often said that no part of my job is more important than hiring, for if we have success in that area, almost every other area of the school will thrive. One theme that has emerged from our Strategic Planning process is that a primary strength of Pike is the quality of our faculty. We need to maintain that quality while striving to have a teaching force that better matches the diversity found in our student body. While we can be proud of the results of our hiring in the past, it became clear fairly early in our training that we would benefit from a more formal process that would be put in writing. Also, we discussed creating a broader list of places to post openings in order to attract a more diverse pool of candidates. Another idea was to have us keep better records of each search, so that we can examine trends over time and learn from previous searches. We then went through a case study Christine created for an article she wrote for the 2010 issue of Independent School, the official magazine of the National Association of Independent Schools. The article was titled “Bias Among the Well-Intentioned: How It Can Affect the Hiring Process,” and it looked at a situation based on reality that has happened in many schools. It was a reminder that even those who are very committed to diversity may have blind spots as the result of life’s experiences of which they are. It can often play out as being more “comfortable” with some candidates than others for reasons that are hard to define. The case study also highlighted the importance of moving fast enough so as not to lose good candidates but also to not rush into a decision that might lead to regrets later. As we are doing more hiring than usual this year at Pike, the timing of the workshop could not have been better. I believe our decisions this year will be positively influenced by this work.

I feel most fortunate to work in a school and a profession that is devoted to life-long learning, for that dedication allows us to strive to always improve upon the work we are doing today, and I believe our children benefit from our commitment.

Keep track of the responses you get from the next ten adults you meet when you ask them how they are. My experience tells me that well more than half will lead off with how busy, tired or stressed they are feeling. Even people returning from amazing vacations will start by talking about how worried they are about all they have to do as a result of being on vacation. It seems as if that we need to be sure we are at least as stressed as our peers to be sure we have something in common. I have heard of colleges that are hiring rescue dogs to come to the library to help ease the stress of students as they prepare for exams by petting the cute animals. Do we live in a more stressful age and should we spend more time finding ways to eliminate stress?

in his book, Brain Rules, John Medina cites the work of Jeansok Kim and David Diamond to define stress. They say stress must result in a physiological response that can be measured by an outsider, must be perceived as something to be avoided (vacation?), and the person involved must not feel in control of the stressor. Medina goes on to describe how stress has changed over the centuries for mankind. In the early years, man’s stressors were related to survival and were more immediate. Just avoiding becoming the prey of other animals, finding enough food and water, and staying warm were of primary concern. Medina says, “Consequently, our stress responses were shaped to solve problems that lasted not for years but for seconds. They were primarily designed to get our muscles moving as quickly as possible, usually out of harm’s way”. In our society, most of these more basic needs have been met. Therefore, how well suited are we to dealing with the more long term stresses of modern day life?

Spending time trying to find ways to eliminate stress from our lives and the lives of our children is not time well spent in my opinion, as we cannot foresee many events and trends that may result in more stress in our future. Rather, we would be well served to better understand the causes of true stress and find better ways to deal with it. Medina cites the work of scientist Bruce McEwen who believes that “…stress, left alone, is neither harmful nor toxic. Whether stress becomes damaging is the result of a complex interaction between the outside world and our psychological capacity to manage the stress”. I believe we can help our children deal with stress more effectively. We can teach them be able to differentiate between real stressors and mere discomfort. Recently, the Secondary School Admission Test Board surveyed secondary school students about the college admission process. One of them was quoted as saying, “The application process was sheer torture. It’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do in my life”. While there is no denying the process can create anxiety, I would argue that if this event is almost too much to bear, that child has a great deal in his/her life for which to be grateful. We should remind them of their many blessings. Also, we can remind them that often they hold the key to easing a stressful situation by keeping things in perspective. Fortunately, we do not often have to face the life and death stressors that early man did. Finally, we can set a good example by reminding ourselves of these lessons. Recently, during a visit to the dentist, the assistant asked me how I was doing. I had just enjoyed an hour of hockey with some Pike students and Hall of Famer Ray Borque of the Boston Bruins that had been a delight. My answer to her was “Fantastic”. She was visibly taken aback, probably expecting the more typical harried response I described at the start of this entry. Perhaps if more of us took that tack, we could help each other and our children have a more positive experience.

The wonderful part about school life is that it is always changing. At Pike, we are always looking for ways to improve our fine program. I thought I would use this report to update you on what is different at Pike School in 2011.

PLT Work – You have heard me discuss how Professional Learning Teams are changing life at Pike as our focus is moving from what we teach and how we teach it to more of an emphasis on what are the essential outcomes for our students and how we know if our students are mastering those key concepts. I believe that this initiative has led to more collaboration among our teaching teams and has allowed division heads to have more meaningful conversations with our faculty about their teaching and forms of assessment. I have seen in my own teaching how this change of perspective permits me to better serve my students.

Communication – The new website will go live on December 16th and we are confident that its capabilities will be appreciated by all members of our community. Each of us can customize our own portal so that it will give us access to all that is important to us. The flexibility of design means that we can keep the look of the site fresh which will make it more appealing. As our world moves toward more social networking, we know that our website will make Pike a more connected community. There will be an app that allows members of our community the ability to get the information it wants on our mobile devices.

Open House- We used lawn signs this year for the first time to advertise the Open House and while we cannot say it was a direct cause, the fact is that we had approximately 100 families attend which is many more than we have had in the past two years. We had more interest in Upper School than we can remember in a number of years. The Marketing Committee is looking at our overall advertising strategy and creating a list of specific objectives (i.e. attract more pre-k families) and will then define strategies to reach those goals.

Diversity- We have hired Diversity Directions and its director, Christine Savini, to do an assessment of our diversity work. She looked at all of our materials, spent time doing observations on campus, and met with many members of our community. We expect her written report about our strengths and opportunities for growth right after Thanksgiving. I did meet with Christine right after her last visit, and she did say we have a great deal of which to be proud, and she encouraged us to be a bit bolder in celebrating our accomplishments. One outgrowth of the work of our Diversity Committee was a new look at our Merrimack Valley Program. One of the consultants from Diversity Directions, Betty Brown, met with our MVP parents. She heard overwhelming appreciation for the program from our parents. The area of greatest anxiety was the secondary school process which many saw as overwhelming. As a result of those conversations, we decided to offer SSAT preparation classes to any Pike students in the eighth or ninth grades that receive 75% or more aid. Two families have taken us up on that opportunity.

Accreditation – We will be writing our self-study document for the accreditation process during the 2012-13 school year. This process is very inclusive and will require a great deal of work. I do think that much of the work we have done and are doing (i.e. community survey, strategic plan, diversity assessment, etc.) will have us in a position of strength as we begin the process that will culminate in the 2013-14 school year with the arrival of an AISNE Visiting Team and their resulting report.

Strategic Planning- The process to create a new long range plan for Pike has begun with the hiring of a consultant (Ian Symmonds & Associates), the creation of a Strategic Planning Steering Committee that has met twice to date, the collection of a great deal of data, and the creation of a timeline for the process whose aim is to have a finished plan by the end of the school year. Many members of the community will be asked to join this effort in January and February.

I have been asked if my job ever gets stale after 18 years. I believe this list is evidence that Pike is a vibrant place that is always evolving in interesting and exciting ways, and I am fortunate to be part of such a community. I look forward to our meeting to discuss this report and any other questions you might have.

Where I grew up (in Buffalo, NY), it seemed as if everyone knew how to skate. Given our winters, it appeared to be an obvious life skill. My father taught me to skate, and to this day, as I coach hockey, I use his adage, which was “If you are not falling down, you are not trying hard enough.” At the time, that seemed a bit counterintuitive to me, as the kids who seemed to be such good skaters always fell down less frequently than I did. Only when I became a coach did I understand that even those good skaters were not going to continue to improve if they stayed in their comfort zones.
Recently at an Upper School assembly, a student delivered a speech that has won him several awards as a member of our speech team. Some of his remarks were as follows:
“The fear of failure, also known as Atychiphobia, is described as an extreme, irrational fear that, like other phobias, prevents us from enjoying some aspects of life. Atychiphobia is also considered one of the more paralyzing and common of phobias. So how is this fear of failure getting to be such a problem? A recent study suggested that the fear of failure is the main reason why 80% of people in the world are unprepared for changing their circumstances. Sometimes, we are so concerned about failing at something that we don’t attempt it. Other times, we weaken our efforts so we don’t have to continue to try, or so it appears that we weren’t trying anyway, so when we inevitably fail, it isn’t such a big deal. When a person acts in this manner they have truly failed, for as Stephen Kaggwa once stated, “Try and fail, but don’t fail to try.” “

Besides being very well delivered, those remarks are remarkably insightful for an early adolescent. In fact, many adults are not able to break out of their comfort zones.
As an educator in a world where there seems to be an increasing focus on helping children develop an impressive resume at ever younger ages, I worry that we have not built in enough opportunities for falling down. I remember hearing a story that may be apocryphal but rings true to what I am seeing today. An admission director at a very well-known competitive university spoke to a group of prospective applicants and said, “What we are looking for are risk takers.” After a dramatic pause he went on to say, “Successful risk takers.” I would argue we cannot have it both ways. By definition, if we take risks, we will not always succeed. However, as our Upper School student said, we will not grow or find our true passions if we fail to try. The best schools and parents create environments in which children have the support and resulting confidence that allow them to lean a little further on that skate blade and cut a sharper edge.

I always love to read books that support a message I believe in. As an exercise addict (5,000+ miles a year on a bike), I have always believed that my physical activity had a direct impact on my mood and focus. As I became a Head, long time professional development guru, David Mallery said I should keep up my running for my own well being and to run at noon in downtown so others would know of my commitment to exercise.

John Ratey is the author of Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain. Ratey’s book does a fine job of mixing anecdotal information (which I have a great deal of) with some hard science (which I had none of). I liked his comment that “In today’s plasma-screened-in-world, it’s easy to forget that we are born movers– because we’ve engineered movement right out of our lives.”

Another idea that he discussed is the impact of modern media that does concern me. We all know that news about good or happy events is seen as fluff and not serious, so the news always seems to find the dark side of a story. For example, watch how often even the positive stories end with a comment about an impending problem. Ratey says : “The 24/7 streaming torrent of tragedy and demands flashing at us from an array of digital displays keep the amygdala flying. The negative and the hectic and the hopeless heap on the stress, but we figure we can handle it because we always have. Up to a point. Then, we just want to relax and take a break. So we grab a drink and plop down in front of the TV or go sit on a beach somewhere. It’s no wonder that obesity has doubled in the past twenty years- our lifestyle today is both more stressful and more sedentary.”

Ratey believes that schools that cut out recess and PE to get more time for “real academics” have it backward. Ratey describes Naperville Central High School, west of Chicago that went the other way by mandating more time for a PE program that emphasized fitness with the result being an amazing rise in the test scores of the students. Our children need to move. We saw that in a rainy first week of school. On the day the sun returned, our students exploded outside to recess and were perpetual motion machines. I am glad we are committed to physical activity whether it is on our ropes course and climbing tower, during regular PE classes, class hikes and canoe trips or even getting out of our seats more often in class than was once the case. STAY ACTIVE!

We asked all faculty, staff, administrators and parents to read Wendy Mogel’s The Blessing of a B- this summer in preparation for what I hope will be some interesting conversations in the fall.  As a parent of three twenty somethings and a camp counselor and educator for over forty years, I have had an interesting perch from which to watch the pendulum swing from one side to the other in fairly dramatic ways.  Lately, it seems that instead of a pendulum that swings from one end of the spectrum to the other over decades, we have a dramatic debate that has “tiger mothers” at odds with “helicopter parents”.  As is often the case in my experience, the truth lies somewhere in between.

The article cited below explains a new (to me) phenomena of depression in young adults that comes not from the stereotypical scenario of mistreatment and neglect from parents but rather from the opposite, parents who do all they can to make their children’s lives as happy as possible.  Copy the link below into your browser to see the video that includes the thoughts of Wendy Mogel, the author of our summer reading on this topic.

There are no easy answers in this complicated area, but I believe our conversations on this topic will be most instructive. I look forward to your input both in our evening meeting and online.

Daniel Pink’s 2009 book entitled Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us is a fascinating read.  I found an interesting visual representation of a speech he gave about the ideas in his book that can be seen at the following link:  http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc.  I certainly enjoyed this creative presentation which I found more engaging than watching a video of a talking head.  His message is an important and somewhat revolutionary one in my opinion.

I have written down the words Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose on a note on my desk, because I think Pink is onto something when he uses these words to describe effective motivation.  Mr. Pink says the following:    “Too many students walk through the schoolhouse door with one aim in mind: to get good grades.  And all too often, the best way to reach this goal is to get with the program, avoid risks, and serve up the answers the teacher wants the way the teacher wants them.  Good grades become a reward for compliance – but don’t have much to do with learning.  Meanwhile, students whose grades don’t measure up often see themselves as failures and give up trying to learn.”  I do share his concern that a hyper focus on grades can be at cross purposes with our mission statement’s emphasis on life-long learning.  We do see students who used to be curious by nature become more interested in what grade they received than in the material to be learned.  In a training I participated in years ago by a group called Research for Better Teaching, they spoke of the concept of GWOTM or Guess What’s on Teacher’s Mind as a type of ineffective teaching.  If I, as the teacher, have the answer in my head and all I try to do is ask questions until the students can give that answer, the danger is that my students ask fewer of their own questions to find their own answers.  The good news is that learning at Pike is much different than it might have been years ago.  There is less GWOTM and more collaborative work, research, and hands-on learning to engage the students.

Pink suggests Do It Yourself report cards for children to make them more responsible for their own learning.  We have done that at Pike for quite some time, whether it is Lower Schoolers sharing their autobiographies with their parents, Middle Schoolers sharing their portfolio of work and describing themselves as learners, or advisor conferences in Upper School where students are asked to set goals at the beginning of a term or reflect on how they did at the end of the term.  We have been working at giving children more specific feedback on their mastery of essential outcomes and giving them the opportunity to grow from very specific assessments rather than simply slapping a grade on a piece of work and moving on.

When I was a student, there was virtually no autonomy until college.  We all did what the teacher asked without asking many questions.  While teachers at Pike are still the educational leaders, they routinely provide the children with some element of choice in their work as a way to engage and motivate them.  My eighth grade history students in the third term have developed a fictional character who will live from 1828-1865, and they are studying all the events of that period from the point of view of that character which is much different way to master that period of history than what I remember.

I encourage you to watch the video and read Mr. Pink’s book.  As always, I look forward to your thoughts and feedback.

Every year, the first grade interviews many members of the Pike adult community to learn about their jobs.  When they come to ask me what I do, it is not always easy to formulate an answer.  However, when they ask what I like about my job, I have a great deal to say.  Those two questions are related in that I like my job because it is hard to define.  No two days are anything like each other.  I thought I would give you a description of yesterday as a way to explain why I feel fortunate to do what I do.

Because I knew today was very full, Liza and I went to the gym at 5:15 AM to get the exercise that we believe gives us the energy we need to keep up with the kids.  We got to school at 7:30 to get ready for the day.  I went to the library where Fran and Linda had provided a nice breakfast and had put out books by Joseph Bruchac who will be here next week as a Visiting Artist, working with our students and teachers.  Then, I tracked down one of the students in my history class who agreed to be the computer whiz for tomorrow when my class will see clips from the DVD Jeremiah Johnson and answer questions about what it was like to be a fur trapper in the period we are studying.  After my daily directing of morning traffic, I went to the monthly Parent Association board meeting.  The chair of our Board of Trustees, Lucy Abislaih, spoke to them about topics the Board is currently investigating.  I showed them the parent survey that our community will be filling out during the last week of April and first week of May.  I explained that this would be a key data point as we begin the process of creating a new five-year strategic plan for our school.  I answered a few questions about topics ranging from admissions to snow days to the calendar.

Next, I answered about 35 emails that were waiting for me and signed some 30 Annual Fund letters, thanking members of the community for generously supporting the school.  From there, I went to Zoe Hastings’ room to read to her Second Graders as part of a school wide initiative during which every child at Pike will be read to by an adult over a two week period.  I talked briefly with a faculty member about a summer grant she was thinking of proposing and then corrected a few of the journals that were due for my history students.  We are in the process of choosing an auditor for the school, so I reviewed my notes about the two firms we met with last night to plan what our next steps would be.  At noon, I had a meeting with a woman from an organization that provides support to non-profit institutions.  After a quick lunch, I went upstairs in the Horne building for our third and final session with the Fifth Grade boys to discuss issues related to puberty, adolescence, and sexuality.  I do believe that these sessions help start the important conversations in families on these topics that are critical to the development of our children.  The Division Heads and I then met with Nancy Gerzon who is the consultant helping us with our PLT work.  We looked at the rest of the year as well as at future directions for this work on effective instruction and assessment.

After a relatively smooth dismissal, we had one of my favorite events, the annual  Faculty/Staff Appreciation reception. Tht is an opportunity to be together as a community and recognize people who have had a long connection with the school, discussing all they have done for the Pike community.  This year, we recognized Aaron Hovel and Ed Santella for ten years of service; Bo Baird, Janet Cooper, and Linda Stratton for fifteen years; and Carolyn Tobey for 25 years at Pike.  Last night, I learned that in the audit industry, the average annual turnover rate is 27%.  We are fortunate that at Pike, that number is between five and ten percent.  After that event, I hurried down to Logan airport to catch a flight to Washington, DC, to spend two days with Steven Labarakwe, our primary host in Kenya.  I will be taking him binders created by our students in Lower and Middle School that tell the story of what it is like to go to school at Pike.  I will also be sending him back to Ngurunit with disposable cameras, so his students can photograph themselves and their school.  The plan is that they will create similar binders that will find their way back to Pike, so our students can learn more about an elementary school in Northern Kenya.  I cannot wait to see a good friend and to build this bridge between our schools.

What a wonderful day!  While some days might be a little less eventful and include more mundane tasks, the variety fits my style exceedingly well.  I feel very fortunate to have found such a wonderful career.  Thanks for helping to make that possible with your support.

Last week, I attended the National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) annual conference just outside of Washington, DC. It is always a good opportunity to catch up with other educators and hear a variety of thought provoking speakers. This year was no different and even though I was there less than 48 hours, I came home with much to consider.

I attended a session on NAIS on iTunes which showed how to access a variety of videos about education at iTunesU. As a collector of music (8700 songs on my iPod), I am regularly at the iTunes site, and yet I was unaware of this resource. Anyone can go to the iTunes store, click on the iTunesU logo on the top bar, then click on the K-12 quick link, and finally click on the National Association of Independent Schools tab to see what is available. I was interested to see the topics addressed and look forward to seeing more of what is there. Also, I am interested in producing some videos of our own to share as I continue to believe that other educators would benefit from seeing the work being done at Pike in a variety of areas from Professional Learning Teams to Diversity to Sustainability and more.

The keynote speaker was Sheena S. Iyengar, the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business at the Columbia Business School. She has taught on a wide variety of topics, including leadership, decision making, creativity, and globalization, earning an Innovation in the Teaching Curriculum award. Internationally, she has taught at the Global Leadership Fellows Program at the World Economic Forum in Geneva, Switzerland. She discussed some of the ideas from her latest book, The Art of Choosing. She cited some interesting studies such as one where two groups of children were given the same task to accomplish and one group was allowed to choose the color marker to do the task while the other was given no choice. Even though the choice was not that important to the task itself, the group that was given the choice performed better. Another interesting aspect of her work was the link she discovered between culture and choice. Anglo-Americans who perceived themselves as having more choice than others performed better while the opposite was true of Asian-Americans whose performance suffered if they felt there were too many choices. Ms. Iyengar said that a good leader does not assume everyone would want the same choices that they have. I look forward to reading her book and thinking more about the impact of choice on the lives of our children, most of whom have more choices available to them than the vast majority of people in the world.

Another featured speaker was Wendy Mogel, an internationally known clinical psychologist, author, and public speaker. Publisher’s Weekly gave her New York Times best-selling parenting book, The Blessing of a Skinned Knee, a starred review saying, “Impassioned, lyrical, and eminently practical, this volume is a real treasure.”
Mogel serves on the scientific advisory board of Challenge Success, a program of the Stanford University School of Education, and the boards of the Center for Early Education (California) and the Counsel for Spiritual and Ethical Education. On an unrelated note, she was at Middlebury College when I was and is married to a classmate of mine. Her remarks were a wonderful mix of homespun humor and wisdom. She explained that in a world that may feel increasingly out of our control, many parents focus on the one piece they feel they can control, their children. She worries that today’s children could file the world’s largest ever class action suit against their parents for stealing their childhood. She cites statistics such as that the average number of contacts between a child at college and a parent is 14.5 times per week. She tells stories like the one about a college student at a salad bar who was overheard saying on the phone to a parent “Do I like French dressing?” She cites these as evidence that our children are growing up in a much different environment and worries about the result of this hyper-focus. College admission officers divide applicants into “teacups” who are fragile because they have been so well protected and “crispies” who are burned out from being ranked and pushed their entire lives. I am confident Dr. Mogel would endorse our mission’s commitment to producing “independent learners and responsible citizens.” I look forward to her newly released book, The Blessing of a B- and look forward to discussing this further in the future as we all strive to give our children enough comfort and support without denying them the opportunities to learn from their own successes and mistakes.

As always, I look forward to your questions and comments.

JANUARY 2011 BLOG

In the last week, Amy Chua’s book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, has been everywhere from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, television, radio, and the Internet. Her book has gotten so much attention because it makes many very strong statements. For instance, one excerpt from her book says, “Chinese parents can get away with things that Western parents can’t. Once when I was young—maybe more than once—when I was extremely disrespectful to my mother, my father angrily called me “garbage” in our native Hokkien dialect. It worked really well. I felt terrible and deeply ashamed of what I had done. But it didn’t damage my self-esteem or anything like that. I knew exactly how highly he thought of me. I didn’t actually think I was worthless or feel like a piece of garbage…. The fact is that Chinese parents can do things that would seem unimaginable—even legally actionable—to Westerners. Chinese mothers can say to their daughters, “Hey fatty—lose some weight.” By contrast, Western parents have to tiptoe around the issue, talking in terms of “health” and never ever mentioning the f-word, and their kids still end up in therapy for eating disorders and negative self-image.”  This article has started a national dialog. Wall Street Journal article

There were two articles this Sunday, one by Nicholas Kristof in The New York Times entitled “China’s Winning Schools?” and the other by Patricia Wen in The Boston Globe entitled “The Chinese Mom Controversy” that continued the conversation. In the latter, Ms. Wen takes issue with Ms. Chua by saying that there is not one style or set of guidelines of Chinese parenting and that there is a “strong tradition of trying to discern a child’s particular temperament- not all Chinese are meant to be brainy scholars – and adapting to it.” She goes on to say that the Chinese are also wrestling with what is in the best interests of the children. In Mr. Kristoff’s article, he says that “Education thrives in China and the rest of Asia because it is a top priority – and we’ve plenty to learn from that.” However, he goes on to say that the Chinese themselves are not happy with their system of education. “Almost every time I try to interview a Chinese about the system here, I hear grousing rather than praise. Many Chinese complain scathingly that their system kills independent thought and creativity, and they envy the American system for nurturing self-reliance – and for trying to make learning exciting and not just a chore.” The grass is always greener, I guess. When I took part in an exchange with a school in Tianjin a few years ago, I went to learn from the Chinese, but my partner in the exchange, Yang Li, was very interested in learning from us.

What is one to do as a parent? We want it all: master math facts, learn a huge vocabulary, read as much as possible, be creative, be physically active, and more. In our vision statement, Pike commits itself to the “whole child.” Ms. Chua, the tiger mother, forbids activities like sleepovers, sports, school plays, etc. because she sees them as distractions from her laser focus on academics. She cites examples of the “successes” of that method of parenting just as we often hear about athletes and artists who have “succeeded” because of a monomaniacal focus on one activity beginning at an early age. I have two questions. First, are these so-called successes really successful? Often, their life stories are not happy or fulfilling ones. Secondly, what is the cost of this style of parenting? She says that she was not hurt when her father called her “garbage” when she behaved inappropriately. We all know of stories when that kind of treatment has had long-term adverse effects.

I have come to believe that the best path is rarely found at one side or the other of any dispute. Our children do need to know that we prize education and that we have high hopes and standards for them. At the same time, we need to know our children well and employ strategies that serve them well rather than making our own plans and trying to force them into that particular box. The good news is that our children are resilient and there is never one correct path for a child. It is far more complicated than that. As evidence for that proposition, Ms. Chua responded to some questions from readers of The Wall Street Journal. “Jokes about A+s and gold medals aside, I don’t believe that grades or achievement is ultimately what Chinese parenting is really about. I think it’s about helping your children be the best they can be – which is usually better than they think!” She went on to say, “There is no easy formula for parenting, no right approach (I don’t believe, by the way, that Chinese parenting is superior – a splashy headline, but I didn’t choose it. The best rule of thumb I can think of is that love, compassion and knowing your child have to come first, whatever culture you’re from.” I look forward to your thoughts.