LA Moms Blog

Chinese School -- Not Just for Children of Uptight Chinese Immigrants Any More

If you grow up Chinese or Taiwanese American, your stories of weekend Chinese school will consist of either using strenuous and silly means to avoid attending, or tales of long Saturdays where you and dozens of other insurrection-minded kids were united in the desire to be anywhere BUT Chinese school. Now, everyone else gets to be an honorary Asian American kid, and undergo the tribulations of Saturday mornings reciting lessons aloud with coaching from the teacher. This is progress!

Unless...you think Chinese language classes taught by native speakers from the People's Republic of China are a TroJAn HOrsE SmUgGliNG in COMMUNIZM!!1!! OMG!1!! OMG!!1!!1 to our poor defenseless American children.

Let's just dispense with that silliness right now, before I get to my main point.

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Both Sides Now: Stage Mom, Director Mom

Since October of 2009, I've been lucky enough to enjoy a full year of mentorship and professional networking among a group of diverse filmmakers who were also selected as Project Involve 2010 Fellows by Film Independent Los Angeles. (They promote independent film in the shadow of the Hollywood studio system and run a film festival as well as the Spirit Awards.) As part of the program, we were expected to write scripts for 3-5 minute short films, and then if so inclined, we could pitch ourselves to direct them. Project Involve/FIND-LA would then act as our indie studio, providing us with a few key resources to produce the films.

My script was selected out of the 40 or so submitted, and my pitch to direct greenlit. Since October it's been a struggle to keep all the plates spinning--work (outside the home), family, and my own professional development in evening workshops and screenings. If that wasn't enough of a balancing act, I cast my son in my short and experienced the most ambivalent feeling of all: that of being stage mom and director mom.

I have to say there were times when the two sides didn't agree.

Snack Does Not Equal Sugar

Yes, I'm the resident Sugar Nazi at my school, the parent who complained when a Halloween celebration involved kindergarteners nibbling powdered sugar donuts tied with string off a clothesline using only their mouths. I'm a wet blanket, I'm here to rain on your parade.

I'm the parent who marvels at the affluent Chinese immigrant parents at the weekend Chinese school in the community next door who haven't gotten the memo yet about the high fructose corn syrup in the snacks they persist in bringing every week. (These performance-oriented, high-striving immigrant parents who are pouring advanced math sets and Mozart violin concertos into their kids at a young age along with artificial colors and bad-for-you sweeteners--incongruity, thy name is San Gabriel Valley parent.)

I don't feel there's a problem with "Snack Time Never Ends," as this NYT piece claims. It's not frequency that's troubling, it's something else. The article's writer says

What is especially baffling where I live, in Los Angeles, is how often the kind of parental paranoia that obsesses about school ratings, vaccines and myriad imagined plagues is matched by utter disregard for the nutritional downsides of mowing down Fruit by the Foot every afternoon at 4. Rarely do I see a parent show up on the soccer field with a homemade snack, or even a bag of carrots. Oreos are the post-game snack of choice, even in sports leagues dominated by upper-income parents.

The Playground Never Changes

My retired parents have taken to helping me with childcare in that gap between the end of school and the time I come home from work late in the evening. (I'm now working outside the home in an office.) It's actually been nice to have them around, as they live about an hour away and in order to take care of the afterschool-homework-dinner-bath-bed routine, my parents stay over night at our house.

Because I send my son off to school in the morning, my parents have a big gap in the day between 9 am and 4 pm.

They decided to check out the senior center in my community. They can play bridge there, or pingpong, or whatever their heart desires. My parents are lifelong bridge players; for them it's like pick-up basketball at the neighborhood court, complete with psych-out mind-games, selling wolf-tickets, and testing out the opponent's moves. (They have a competitive streak but so far as I know they don't trash talk.)

The first few times they went to play, they came back crowing that they'd won.

LAUSD: Can Parents Turn Their Kids' Schools Around?

I follow news of what happens in huge, admittedly troubled Los Angeles Unified School District pretty closely. Like Chicago, New York City, and DC, Los Angeles' school system is a lab for experimentation and reform. While many schools within the system are quietly doing a great job day-in and day-out, there are inevitably schools blighted by burned-out teachers and ineffectual administrators unable to reach a student population that lacks motivation and/or the right support. There's always a sense of urgency when it comes to underperforming schools--no one wants willy-nilly experimentation when a kid's education is at stake. And nobody wants mediocrity if we can help it. We all want the solution that works right away. Like, yesterday.

And though my own child attends public schools in a much smaller district, I'm always interested in what's happening in the USD next door; plenty of children and families are affected who are our friends and neighbors. I follow LAUSD just in case the trouble starts to seep into the USD my kid attends. What if we have to move back into LAUSD, or when my child gets older he shows abilities that would be better suited to a LAUSD magnet school, something our home USD doesn't offer? For these reasons, I like to keep a watchful eye open.

Instead of Spanking Kids--Another, Gentler Way?

There are a lot of third rails in parenting--I'd list some, but really, what isn't?--and I'm going to go ahead and mention one of them. Spanking.

We chose not to. I have to explain, I grew up with a somewhat traditional Chinese immigrant upbringing, as did my spouse. It's an authoritarian kind of parenting. None of this nonsense about being your child's friend. And certainly no positive reinforcement. It's all about results, and often this means grades. If you produce, you're rewarded, but if you don't, you find out how quickly approval becomes conditional. And spanking young kids to get them to behave is just something parents do to help get those results.

Huz and I delivered: we went to Ivy League schools, we got postgraduate degrees, we're reasonably well-employed, we've never been arrested...all the things nice Chinese American kids are supposed to do when they grow up. But when we discussed how we were going to raise our son, a discussion we had when kidlet was still in utero, we ruled out spanking. We thought it was unnecessarily harsh. And in my recollection, I could never remember *why* I'd gotten a smacking with a ruler on my hand, just that in the moment, I had very strong feelings, to be perfectly honest, of hate toward the person smacking me. Those feelings blocked out any message I was supposed to hear.

That seemed to undermine the whole point of "teaching a lesson" right there. Mind you, we weren't going to go whole hog in the other direction. We just wanted to ease up on the harsh immigrant thing a little.

Occasionally it took a lot of deep breathing exercises and on-the-spot meditation (sometimes serenity NOW through gritted teeth), but we got through my son's toddler and preschool years without ever having to hit him to make him behave. Through a lucky combination of his sweet temperament and our attempts to reason with him, he seems pretty well-behaved. It was hard, but I'm glad we tried to avoid outbursts and actions on our part that are hard to take back. And now it seems research on corporal punishment shows that it does influence children's behavior--just, maybe not in the desired way.

The Kindergarten Chronicles: That *Other* School, Chinese School--or a Soft Gentle Kick in the Pants

We were lucky that our son took to kindergarten like a duck to water. He literally skipped home from school with me after the first day, and said, "Mama, that was the funnest day ever!" Day two yielded the comment, "That was the second funnest day ever!" Etc. (I was pleased but also a little skeptical....I wanted to say, "Pace yourself, kid, you've got a minimum of 12 and probably 16 more years to go." But hey, take your little victories where you can get them, right?)

It was the other school I was worried about. (Those of you who send your kids to Hebrew school or Ukrainian school, and so on, will know what I'm talking about.)

The Kindergarten Chronicles: Day 2

I know many parents get emotional about their child's first day at Real School. (Preschool simply being a pretend version of Real School.) Kindergarten is a rite of passage.

However, Day 1 for our son was uneventful, because he'd just gotten over a fever. His half-day morning kindergarten was only 1/4 of a full day long--90 minutes--because the point was to slowly ease 20 kids into the routine and let their anxious parents do the same.

Don't Piss Off the Parents

I've thrown my lot in with people who send their kids to public school. (We did the private preschool thing, here, but are committed to sending our son to our local public schools.) In our community, we voted in a parcel tax to try to make up for some of the school district's budget shortfall caused by wrangles over the governor's approach to funding budget priorities and legislative logjams over alternatives.

But here's something interesting about parents whose kids go to LA Unified schools--they're starting to scream. Steve Lopez reviews a number of different parents' advocacy groups sprouting up in his LA Times article, "Could Parents' Screams Jolt LAUSD Into Action?" The idea is to use the threat of withdrawing kids from public schools to make them improve, and instead, putting kids into charter schools where there can be more parental input.

Dear Hippie Preschool, We'll Miss You

A couple weeks ago, it was my son's last day at his warm, happy little hippie preschool. It's part of a larger school that continues to 8th grade, and this year, his teacher teamed with the 6th grade class to bring the 5-turning-6 kids together with the 11-turning-25 kids. (I joke; they're still sweet and not *that* grown.) My son adored his older buddy. They went on a field trip together, they drew the flora and fauna they saw at the park, they hung out and talked the finer points of Pokemon and Star Wars.

While there's been a fair amount of drama at our school this year, we were lucky to have much of it swirl past us. This school has always been a welcoming place.

The first day we dropped our son off, he was almost three years old. We parents hung around after circle time, the true beginning of the school day, and watched as our tiny darlings explored the classroom like puppies. Some of us couldn't bear to leave. Others were more resilient--their kid, like ours, having already had time away in a daycare or nursery school setting for at least a few hours every so often. My son decided he had to visit the bathroom, so he grabbed the hand of the little boy who would become his best friend and together they marched off to the potties.