The Good, The Bad

My eldest son and I were watching Heroes one night. He asked me, "Daddy, who are the good guys in this movie?"

I replied that there were no real good guys or bad guys, just a lot of good guys doing bad things.

He watched some more before responding: "Daddy, I'm confused."

Something clicked for me at that moment.

There must have been men fighting or he would not have noticed that there were two sides in the story. My son is still very young. The books we read him and the stories we usually let him watch draw a distinct line between the "Good" and the "Bad." However, the books usually don't go into why the wolves or witches do the things they do that make them bad. 

Joseph Campbell was all over PBS touting his "Power of Myth" when I was in college. Almost like one of their fundraiser drives, after heavy airplay, he disappeared into oblivion; available only to fans and casual browers of the PBS video catalog. Though Campbell's focus was mythology and not parenting, I have found meaning in Campbell. At 40something that meaning is changed from what it was at 19.As we age from children to adults, at some point we need to leave good and bad contructs of perception and accept a new paradigm that mires perceived good and bad acts in more complex dances of motives and emotions.

But what does that mean to my son? How do I clear his confusion? Motives and emotions are hard enough to understand at 40. How do I explain them to someone who is just building his vocabulary of emotions? I need a "Now" answer.

It would have been easier to have villified one character over another. We see it in political and religious campaigns all the time. Good Guy/Bad Guy. President Bush brought the adjective "evil doer" out of radio scripts into modern day politics. Religion draws dangerously distinct lines between what is called "Good" and what is called "Bad" - though it seldom practices what it preaches (sorry, couldn't resist the jab).

The scene from Bedazzled where Dudley Moore is dancing around Peter Cook just popped into my head. It's in this scene that the Devil (Cook) explains to the movie's protagonist, Stanley (Moore) why he fell out of favor with God. He explains that he had been loyal to God for centuries and then God one day says that his son Jesus is in charge. The Devil says he loved God so much that he just couldn't follow Jesus, so he and a few other "True Believers" revolted.

 My son and I watched the rest of the episode in silence, absorbed by what was going on. I was engaged on what would happen next and I would like to believe he was engaged in trying to understand why what was happening was happening.

TAG, You're It!

My wife's and my latest dilemma has been over Talented and Gifted (TAG) programs. She favors them, whereas I do not. She believes students in these programs have better access to a school's latest and greatest resources (e.g. equipment, books, and teachers). She believes our son would be better challenged academically in a TAG environment.

I agree with my wife that TAG programs have better access to a school's resources than mainstream classrooms. However, I also believe that TAG programs are elitist programs meant to establish social and intellectual hierarchies. I am afraid throwing our son into a TAG program would cause him to support the unfair and condemning social and intellectual hierarchies that exist and subvert the notion of social responsibility and conscience that I hope to instill in him.

I Googled "dangers of talented and gifted programs" and then "negative impact of talented and gifted programs" (and then I Yahoo!ed) but didn't turn up anything - though I am sure there has been research done on the impact of TAG programs on the social and intellectual development of TAG students and mainstream students. I did manage to find an opinion piece regarding the impact of a TAG program on students that do not get selected.

I wonder what the impact would be, if you provided low performing students with TAG access to resources? Among the resources, you would have to include a "safe" environment. One where the student felt confident about letting his or her "guard" down and fully exploring the content assigned.

New York Magazine ran an article about the New Explorations in Science, Technology, and Math school (NEST+m), a TAG school that was to serve as an example to the rest of the public school system. However, in my opinion, the principles on which it was founded were misguided. NEST+m was founded on the desire to build a "private school" in a public school setting. Instead of building on the positive aspects of the New York City public school system, NEST+m adopted all of the negative aspects of the private school system - elitism, social Darwinism, profiling, etc.

Why do people believe that the education in the private school system is superior to that of the public school system? I am not convinced that the private school system provides a better education than the public school system. For me, it is an issue of nature v. nurture. For me, if you provide low income students with the same environment upper class students are privileged to in private schools, you could generate the same results. Of course, you would also have to address issues of "safety." BUT provide a safe environment for students to learn and they will learn.

Students stop learning when they stop being challenged. In my surfing for information about the negative impact of TAG programs, I came across a legal sounding document from Virginia regarding how TAG students are identified. It was a long piece about the racial inequities inherent to TAG programs. It stated that the criteria for determining TAG students often overlooked those students labeled as troublemakers or had a history of acting out. It stated that some of these students might be TAG students. It stated that these students acted out because they were not appropriately challenged.

Like any other parent, I like to think my children are filled with great potential. As a parent, who is also an educator, I struggle to distinguish "true" academic potential with parental pride. Would my son make a good TAG student? Would he be able to be both the TAG son my wife wants and the socially conscious son that I want?