Good citizenship taught

The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically because the students, faculty and parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance; it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.

That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.

And therein lies the solution to bullying. Schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.

Jonathan Kamens, Brighton

Here’s what I originally sent them:

Standing up to bullies is not enough

The terrible tragedy of Phoebe Prince’s suicide, following months of relentless bullying by other students, has triggered yet another wave of calls for schools to enforce strict anti-bullying policies. Such policies are important, but if they were enough, then the bullying problem would have been eliminated long ago. Bullying is the symptom, not the disease, and the time for stronger medicine is long overdue.

When bullying is pushed into the spotlight, it is always because of a tragedy. The rarity of these leads us to believe that the bullying which caused them is also rare, a belief to which we cling because it absolves us of communal responsibility. But in fact, bullying and meanness have become the norm: a 2001 study estimated that 30% of students in the U.S. were involved in bullying.

The academic subjects taught in school are intended to give our children the skills and knowledge they need to grow into happy, successful adults. Respectful, polite, and thoughtful behavior, which in our parents’ day was referred to as “good citizenship,” is just as critical as reading, writing or arithmetic, and it, too, needs to be taught continuously.

The school my wife and I chose for our children stands out dramatically from the others because the students, faculty, and even the other parents are nice to each other and happy to be there. This does not happen by chance. Rather, it is the result of a consciously designed, constantly maintained culture which emphasizes respect and empathy as the community’s most precious values.

That culture could not possibly be achieved through punishment and discipline. Rather, good citizenship is an essential component of the curriculum, in every class and every grade.

And therein lies the solution to the bullying problem. Our schools cannot merely teach our children not to be bad; we must teach them to be good.

My children attend JCDS, Boston’s Jewish Community Day School.  Students at all academic levels are admitted to the school.  JCDS is less concerned about intellect than about whether the student, and his or her parents, are compatible with the school’s culture.

In the 6½ years I’ve had children at JCDS, only a few families have chosen to leave.  Some of those departures were due to academic needs the school could not fulfill, but others were because their kids simply didn’t fit in.

I’m sure many of you just cringed.  We all know what “didn’t fit in” means, right?  Kids that are brainy, nerdy, funny-looking, or too fat.  Kids who do their homework and care about getting good grades.  Kids who would rather play D&D than football.  Right?

Nope.  At JCDS, fitting in isn’t about any of those things.  Rather, it’s almost entirely about one thing and one thing only: treating others with respect.  Kids with an “attitude” just don’t fit in at JCDS.  What’s most interesting is that usually, their parents don’t either.

For example, one girl who entered the school in first grade left with her family two years later.  During those years, my wife and I saw and heard of countless incidents in which this girl was mean to other kids.  We weren’t surprised by her behavior, because, frankly, she was just like her mother.  Is it any surprise that a woman who adorned her car with a “mean girl” bumper sticker, who seemed to take pride in being pushy, demanding, and self-centered, would have a daughter who had trouble treating her peers with respect?

Bullies are made, not born.  Not every bully has mean parents, but the odds are that when you look at the adults in a bully’s life, you will find people who at best failed to actively model and teach respect, and at worst did the opposite.

Parents are the biggest influence in their children’s lives, but the second biggest influence is, of course, school.  Our schools share responsibility for teaching and modeling respect.  They are, by and large, falling short.

Having a “zero tolerance” policy about bullying isn’t good enough.  Teaching kids why bullying is bad isn’t good enough.  Even empowering kids to step in when they see someone else being bullied isn’t good enough.  People always fall short of the ideal, so if the ideal you’re teaching is “don’t bully,” then guess what — the bullying isn’t going to stop.

Stop teaching students what not to do, and start teaching them what they should do.  Teach them to be nice to their peers.  Teach them to be respectful to their peers.  Teach them that meanness and disrespect, even when they fall short of what one might consider “bullying,” will simply not be tolerated.  And then don’t tolerate it.

A major part of the JCDS curriculum, in every class in every grade, is middot v’derekh eretz.  There is no good translation for these terms, but a loose translation is “character traits and civil, polite, and thoughtful behavior.”  JCDS doesn’t merely teach its students not to be bad.  It teaches them to be good. The results are obvious: the two things remarked upon most often by visitors to the school are that the students are nice and happy.

I challenge the principal of any school with a bullying problem to visit JCDS and learn from their approach.

This morning, my oldest daughter, who at 11½ surely should know better, saw something interesting on my computer screen, which was visible because I was accessing it remotely from work (with Linux, when you connect to your desktop remotely, it is visible on the local monitor).  I watched with amazement from work as she moved my mouse around and opened several of my documents.

When I realized what was going on, I locked the screen.  To my even greater amazement, rather than this causing my daughter to come to her senses and realize that she wasn’t supposed to be touching my computer, she clicked the “Switch user…” button, thus breaking my remote connection and locking me out until I got home from work.  (I’ve since fixed my configuration so that I can’t be locked out like that again, but that’s not the main point of this story.)

This was the last straw.  No longer will I tolerate items mysteriously disappearing from my desk with none of the kids taking responsibility.  Thanks to the wonderful open-source software package Motion, the Webcam atop my monitor will now capture and save images of anyone who touches anything on my desk.  Busted!

What makes this interesting enough to be worth blogging about (in my opinion; yours, obviously, may differ!) is how I solved the problem of not filling up my disk with images of me using the computer.  I wrote this script, which is designed to be run as a GNOME startup application.  Whenever my screen is locked, it turns on the camera, and when the screen is unlocked and the camera is turned on, it prompts every 15 minutes to ask whether to turn it off (it prompts rather than always turning it off because I may be accessing the computer remotely and want the camera to remain on).

There are detailed comments at the top of the script explaining how it works and how to use it.  I’m posting it here on the off chance that it might prove useful to someone else.  Enjoy!

(click for larger image)

After the last of our pet mice passed on, the kids wanted to try something a little different, so we bought a pair of female gerbils from PetCo.  One of them got sick a few days later, so PetCo replaced it with another female from the same litter.  Or so we thought.

Small rodents are notoriously difficult to sex, so with all the pairs we’ve been inviting into our home, it was only a matter of time before we got one that was sexed incorrectly.  When the new gerbil, Midnight, began chasing the old one, Twilight, around the cage, and when Twilight subsequently got much larger over the course of a few weeks, we knew what had happened.

Yesterday, I noticed that Twilight seemed a bit more svelte, so I went rooting around in her burrow and discovered the little pink blobs shown above, photographed with a quarter to show their size.  I think there’s another one or two of them hiding in the litter that I didn’t get in the photo — I don’t want to dig around too aggressively to count them until they’re a little larger and less fragile.

We’re just pleased as punch to have new babies in the family without my wife having had to bear them.  The kids are also very excited.

Tomorrow morning we’re going to visit PetCo, ask whether the babies need any special care, and ask what their policy is about taking back rodents born to parents they claimed were both the same sex.  It’ll be fun to watch the babies grow up, but we have no intention of keeping five or six gerbils at once instead of the two we started with.

If you’re in the Boston area and are interested in a free gerbil or two when they’re weaned, please don’t hesitate to ask.  One warning, though: no one in my family has any experience gerbil sexing, so if you take two, you may later end up figuring out what to do with some extra gerbils.

’nuff said.

Four-year-old: “I am just dying for a nap.  I will have to take a very short one or I can’t go to pickup nicely at all.”

Mr. Fleury,

On Friday, August 21, my family and I were “stranded” in Hartford for the weekend.  We are observant Jews, and therefore riding in cars is forbidden to us during the Sabbath, from Friday evening through Saturday night.  We were on our way home from New Jersey to Boston on that day, and we realized as we drove through Hartford that because of unexpected traffic delays, we were not going to make it home in time for the Sabbath.  With less than an hour until the start of the Sabbath, we stopped in Hartford and started looking for a place to stay; we ended up at the downtown Marriott, right next door to the Science Center.

We are also forbidden from watching TV on the Sabbath, nor are we permitted to spend money or write.  Therefore, as you might imagine, finding a way to occupy our five children for the entire Sabbath in these unexpected surroundings was a substantial challenge.

On Saturday morning, desperate for something to do with the kids, we walked over to the Science Center, explained our situation to a member of your staff at the admissions desk, and asked if it would be possible, given our unusual and difficult predicament, to visit the Center without paying.  She called over a supervisor, to whom we explained the situation again.  The supervisor said that she could not let us in without paying “in fairness to our other guests who pay.”

Let me be blunt: That’s stupid, antithetical to your mission, and unlikely to help you to draw more visitors in the future.

As your Web site notes, you already offer “courtesy discounts (with valid ID) for active military personnel, educators and college students,” so your policies are already “unfair,” if indeed allowing some people to pay reduced rates is “unfair.”  Furthermore, I hope that you have some sort of arrangement for reduced or free admission for people who cannot afford to pay your rates; the Boston Museum of Science, for example, has free entry passes that can be checked out from all Boston Public Library branches.  Finally, if you are not accessible to people who cannot afford to pay for admission, then clearly you are failing to live up to your mission of “engaging students and families from all social and cultural backgrounds,” then clearly you need to be accessible to people who cannot pay.

On rare occasions, my wife and I have been in similar situations in the past, and when an institution is kind enough to let us partake of their services without paying because of the Sabbath, we always send them a donation afterwards equivalent to what we would have paid if had been able to do so.  However, I can’t offer to pay after the fact, because Jewish law views an offer to pay later as equivalent to paying, and it is therefore prohibited on the Sabbath.

If you had let us in, we would have paid $84 after the fact and talked about how great your museum was to all of our friends in Boston.  Worst-case scenario, we might not have paid after the fact, but we would still have had a good time at your museum and told our friends about it, as well as telling them that you were accommodating to our religious observance in a time of need.  Instead, what we are telling all our friends is that while the staff at the downtown Marriott was astoundingly helpful and accommodating and made what could have been an extremely difficult experience into a pleasant one, the folks at the Connecticut Science Center were unhelpful and inflexible.  Is this the message you want to be sending?

One more thing I would like to mention is this offensive statement from your Web site:

Exclusive Membership

We think we’re a pretty unique place. We have exhibits no one else in the country (or the world) offers. And we like to think our members are one-of-a-kind, too. That’s part of the reason we don’t extend reciprocal admission to other ASTC members or regional destinations. So, consider yourself part of an elite group.

Aside from the fact that “pretty unique” is an oxymoron, do you really not realize how offensive it is to every other science museum in the country, and to the members who patronize and support them, to suggest that you’re just too special to offer reciprocal admission as thousands of them do?  Oh, please, get over yourselves. (We are members of both the Boston Museum of Science and Mystic Aquarium, so were it not for your misguided policy of not offering reciprocal admission, I would have had no reason to write this letter.)

We drive through Connecticut on a regular basis, and you can be sure we won’t be including the Connecticut Science Center in our travel plans in the future.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Kamens

The two most important rules are: (1) avoid movies that are so popular that most of the girls have probably already seen them; (2) avoid horror movies, because as grown-up as these girls think they are, we’d rather not be comforting terrified girls and calling their parents to come take them home in the middle of the night.

Also, given that our daughter is not exactly immersed in “mainstream” American teen culture, ix-nay on the sex and vulgarity with which many kids at this age seem to already be familiar.

From the swingset I returned to “home base,” the bench next to which I had left our wagon upon arriving at the park.  The wagon, with our coats and diaper bag in it, was gone.

I scanned the playground and found it about fifty feet away.  With a small child in it.  With our coats and diaper bags spread out on the ground next to it.

I walked over to the wagon.  “Please get out of our wagon.  It’s not yours, and it’s not nice to throw other people’s things on the ground.”

Silence.  A look like I’m an alien. (“How dare you tell me what to do?  You’re not my parent!  Oh, wait, my parents don’t tell me what to do either!”)

I tried again.  “Please get out of our wagon.  It’s not appropriate to use other people’s things without permission or throw their things on the ground.

Silence again, but this time he got out.  I loaded our things back into the wagon and pulled it back to where it belonged.

I have no idea where were the child’s parents were during all of this.

I said to 1.5 loud enough for the two mothers to overhear: “When one of these babies is finished, then it’ll be our turn.”  Then I waited.  And waited.  And waited.

After a few minutes of waiting, I noticed that there were a few kids waiting for the big-kid swings, one of which was occupied by4.  “Aha!” I said to myself.  “Here’s an opportunity for me to make sure 4 does the right thing while sending a hint at the same time.”  So I called over to 4, “4, there are other kids waiting, and you need to give them a turn.  Three more minutes, and then you need to get off.”  She bargained for minutes and we settled on four more.  A couple of minutes later (what, you think a four-year-old can tell time?), I told her it was time for her to get off, and she calmly stopped swinging, got off the swing, and gave it to one of the kids who was waiting.

The mothers were seemingly oblivious.  I kept waiting, until several minutes later, one of the mothers turned to her baby in the swing and asked her if she wanted to get out.  The baby made it clear that she was going to throw a fit if the mother took her out, at which point the mother turned to me and said, “Sorry, but what can I do?  At this age, she knows what she wants, eh?”

I bit my tongue and choked back the answer I wanted to give: “Yes, lady, she knows what she wants, and she knows how to get it, too!  When you give a kid that age a choice about whether to do the right thing or be selfish, guess what?  She’s going to choose to be selfish!  It’s your job as a parent to teach her that sometimes she has to share, not to let her walk all over you by threatening to tantrum every time you try to make her do something.  How do you think she’s going to learn proper values if you don’t teach them to her?”

Instead of saying all that, I just smiled weakly and said nothing, and 1.5 and I walked away to find something else to do.

Sheesh.