Last night I went to an information session at my son’s school for parents of students in either their last or second-to-last year of high school. (It is my son’s last year and, yes, this is the same school mentioned in my The Prepared Mind article.) The idea was that we-the-parents learn about the application process for the next step in our children’s education. This morning, I am once again working my way out of the loop that this set me on.

When I was growing up in Ontario, elementary school was grades K through 8 and high school was grades 9 through 13. Now Ontario’s educational system has changed to match the rest of Canada (minus Quebec) and high school goes from grades 9 through 12. And/but, here in Quebec, it was different then and it is different now.

In Quebec, elementary school is grades K through grade 6. Then there are 5 years of high school named Secondary I through Secondary 5, corresponding to grades 7 through 11 elsewhere. So… here in Quebec, grade 11 is considered “a high school education” but… this level of education isn’t enough for admission into college or university programs. So, here in Quebec, there are two other paths of education after high school. One is maybe what is/was called “trade school” elsewhere and is called “professional training” here, where they offer two or three year programs in trades and certain professions. The other type of “post high school” education is, I guess, what is called “prep school” where most programs offered are two years long and are in preparation for a university education.

I guess it’s not so very different from what happens in high school “naturally” with the focusing in of interests by taking more classes of subjects that are liked and the minimum required of what isn’t. Here though it’s made “official”. The students declare their choice and intention and apply to specific programs in specific schools. The school applied to then “accepts” or not. When the school accepts the student’s intention, the deal is sealed through the paying of tuition fees, the choosing of any options, the purchasing of books, the handing out of schedules and addresses. I suppose that the responsibility for “education” is handed over to the student and I guess it’s a way to foster “seriousness” but I’m still not sure how I really feel about all of this, particularly where boys are concerned.

Statiscally speaking, girls do better “at school” than do boys up until university. Then the statistics shift around. And I have often wondered what the statistics do and don’t account for. And, yes, I am about to generalize way more than I like to do but it seems that there isn’t much room for subtlety here.

I am convinced that when a boy makes it to university here in Quebec via the public school route, they have learned about what seriously applying themselves means. A few (maybe like my son) “get it” a bit later in their lives but once they get it, they get it and sometimes it isn’t yet “too late”. This isn’t the case for all boys and for this I refer you back to the Less than 50% article of a few years ago. Yes, less than 50% of boys who start high school here in Quebec don’t finish high school and I’ve learned a bit more about this firsthand as my children work their way through the years and levels.

I noticed schools giving up on kids in elementary school and in high school I have the overwhelming and distressing sense that it’s all about giving kids enough room to either hang themsevles or not. Certainly “difficulties” are passed along or, maybe more true, “missed understandings” (and newly presented opportunities) are, seemingly from my point of view, ignored.

My son, according to me, got through elementary school on charm. He met a few bumps and had a few crashes in high school and/but he continued on, passing from one level to the next, until he found himself slated for Sec. 5 Given his marks in Sec. 4 (and given my surprise that he had made into Sec. 4 in the first place) I was a little horrified to see that “all was normal”. He barely had the basics (according to me) and although he could have managed to graduate high school, he certainly wouldn’t have had the prerequisites to continue on to CGEP or university (according to the schools).

For what my son wants to do, prep school is part of the path but looking at my son’s school record (including the suspension coming from The Prepared Mind “experience”), the school (I guess) never imagined that this might be the case. I suppose that post high school (graduated or not), according to the school, he would have done “whatever”. There are programs to help kids catch up post “official” high school. There are preparatory preparatory programs. There are jobs to be had. And/but I look and see that a lot of “adult education” programs are filled with 17 and 18 year olds. I read the statistics and see that over half of boys who start high school don’t finish high school here in Quebec (meaning grade 11.) And I think this is nuts. Or maybe I am by thinking that it is up to my son to determine his desired path and that it’s the parents and school system whose role it is to help him learn to walk it.

Anyway, last year my son and I asked that he be allowed to repeat his Secondary 4. And given that my son also requested this, the school considered the request and ultimately allowed it. This was a big deal for my son and it was actually my father’s wisdom that pushed us to pushing forward on this.

My father (whom I can imagine much like my son as a boy but even “wilder” in that he was away from home and at boarding school) said that at about my son’s age, after having failed a bunch of subjects, he was given an ultimatum by his father. He either accept a tutor over the summer and pass all of the make-ups exams he could write or he was out working. My father (much like my son) was in no hurry to work so he accepted the tutor. And he took the make-up exams. And he was surprised and thrilled to see that he had actually “understood”. Having now literally “tasted” success, he wanted this again. So, he worked for it. And he obtained it. So… my father’s wisdom was that you can’t strive for success if you’ve never known it. Brilliant!

Maybe this “brilliance” is rather obvious but it wasn’t to me. I was always a good, well-behaved, wanting-to-please-by-succeeding-until-I-learned-to-want-to-succeed-for-myself student. I have had my own failures, I’ve made my own mistakes (so I’m probably okay at consoling) but I have always been quite “driven” and was frustrated and baffled about how to begin to motivate my son to have pride in his achievements. I guess the key to that is that you need some achievements to start with.

So the short of that leg of this story is that last year my son repeated his Secondary 4. At the parent-teacher-student “first” meetings of the year, the teachers had almost nothing to say except “He is not the same student. Good work. Keep it up.” And by the end of the evening neither my son nor I wanted to leave :o) He ended his year with his best average ever and having convinced a bunch of his friends to stick out school, to try again, to not give up. Throughout last year he aligned himself for the program he would be applying to post high school and this year he actually came home absolutely enthused about the courses that his prep school program meant he would do. Amazing.

So… in my view, given that there is the additional, perhaps, stumbling block of being accepted or not into prep school here in Quebec (there’s an 92% acceptance rate — high but meaning that 8% who want to continue on are told they can’t), the boys who do make it to university are incredibly “applied” and have learned a bunch about themselves as young-about-to-be-adults.

Back to girls… girls naturally (yes, I’m generalizing) want to please so they/we usually do “well” (again in quotation marks) at school by handing things to the teachers that we know the teachers want to receive. We are, I believe, not necessarily better at school but we do seem to be better “behaved”. And in elementary and high school, behaviour counts for a bunch. We are not, though and usually, taught to please ourselves. So… do we want to continue on to university or not? Umm… good question. Some of us do and some of us don’t. Again generalizing, it often seems to depend on what is or isn’t expected of us.

For those who do continue on, learning about ourselves as young-about-to-be-adult-women often begins when we begin university. “Whom are we really pleasing?” starts to matter particularly given that our daily doses of encouragment that used to come in the form of teachers, falls away. Often we aren’t surrounded by our network of girlfriends which is much more important than I think we’ve ever consciously accepted or admitted to. And all of a sudden we are surrounded by guys who are there post-some-process that we are just beginning. Things shift big time. And the averages change.

So, today I again think of all of this after last night’s information session. I found the speakers had a very lackadaisical attitude about it all. And in a bunch of ways they’re right. Our children will have a life. And stress is stress. And expectations should be “discovered”. I suppose. In the meantime, though, who holds the “right” expectations for our children while they’re learning to come up with their own? Who makes “succeeding” in a way that makes them grow as individuals into incredible adults possible? You know, I don’t know.

Even the application process that was laid out last night — applicable to both trade or prep school — makes me think that we are teaching our kids to manage their “careers” the way we manage business or sports strategies or investments or lottery tickets for that matter. It seems to be more about the (calculated or not) risk involved and even the name evolves around something like “3 chances”.

The way it works is this… March 1st is the application deadline for “round 1”. At this point, kids may apply to one program at one specific school. In April they hear whether or not they were accepted. If they weren’t accepted, they are given a list of all the spaces remaining in the trade/prep school circuit. In May they may apply with their second choice of one specific program in one specific school. In June they hear. back. Again, if they weren’t accepted, they are given the now dwindling list of “spaces”. In July they may again apply for the third and last time. And in August they hear the answer.

The person speaking to us about this said, basically, “You know, it’s no big deal. If kids don’t get into their desired program or they’re not sure what is that they want to do all they have to do is get into the school they want, do well the first term and then ask to be transferred into their original or other choice.” He actually said this. And the kids themselves have been passing this strategy around amongst themselves. But… how can this be no big deal?

Imagine being a 17 year-old. The first round of applications is answered during the school term. You see the happy faces. You see the disappointed ones. The next rounds happen after school is out and high school is over. Imagine needing to wait until August to hear if you have somewhere to go, something to do, if your future is starting in the next couple of weeks or not? Imagine bumping into someone who already knows or, inverted, already knowing and bumping into someone who doesn’t. Not a big deal? I beg to differ.

And… beyond that what about enthusiasm and motivation and inspiration and helping our kids learn to take charge of their lives and to succeed according to their own standards? Who is left around them by August? Is there really a mystery around why so many kids “disengage”?

A couple of my son’s friends who graduated high school last year, didn’t get into their programs of choice. One of these was “carpentry”. This friend’s father is a cabinet maker and he, the friend, has always known that he would “do” carpentry. And, despite the shortage of carpenters, there aren’t that many carpentry programs. So… he would do what for a whole term? I actually don’t get how I would manage to succeed at something like “auto mechanics” if I wanted to do carpentry. Or why I would go back to school if in the meantime I had found a job related to my field and was making money and had no homework or classes that I didn’t yet see the benefit of? Or how would I succeed in a humanities program if I really wanted to be doing science? Or, or, or…?

And despite profoundly believing that these kids will find their way, I can’t believe — or maybe more truthfully, I really don’t want to believe — that we (as a society) have become so disenchanted that we believe we can or have to “play at success”. Or that we can really feel that this is “no big deal”.

Back to last night… at one point the new director of the Sec. 5 level spoke of a “student profile” that had been mailed to us. We asked with our mumbling “What student profile?” He held up the paper and said that we should have received this. A couple of “yes”es moved through the gathering but most of us were mumbling “Nope. Didn’t recieve it.” The director was baffled. We began worrying that our child had been forgotten. He wondered what had gone wrong. Well… the mystery was solved when we learned that these papers were only sent to parents of students deemed “in difficulty”. And, now, I am amazed that the director was amazed that the parents who were there last night weren’t, in the large majority, parents of students “deemed in difficulty”. Has our school system (to not make this personal) really not yet figured out this link? Have they/we not yet learned that they/we — the adults — give up or gave up on the kids way before the kids give or gave up on themselves? Have they/we really not yet understood that in today’s day and age, kids succeed despite the screwed up context we provide them with?

A case in point for this latter… the evening began with this same director taking some time to talk about the biggest problem “they” have, that of absenteeism. (And I write “they” because the problem was presented as belonging to the school.) He said that this is a huge problem and that “kids who tell you they didn’t have a class because some teacher or another was not present are not telling the truth. There are always substitute teachers.” So… to that point… maybe they have indeed changed something between last year and this one but, although there usually does seem to be an adult present, they aren’t always teachers. And even when they are teachers, they often don’t have the material necessary to “teach” or even to simply “carry on”. And I know that my son always has a pack of cards in his backpack “just in case”.

The director went on to say that these same kids, at their age, are not yet in a position to judge whether “this class lead by this substitute teacher” is worth their while or not. I will address this point a bit later on.

After the introduction to the problem, we were presented with the solution… a new “phone system for absenteeism” operational since last week. Each day, in each class attendance is noted and sent to the level’s secretary. The secretary compares the absences against the list of absences she knows about (from parents having called in to report them) and any “unmotivated” absence is plugged into this phone system. At the end of the day, the system goes through all of the marked absences and calls the parents with a message that says “Your child missed one or more classes today. Please call us to tell us if this was motivated or not.” Sounds good right?

Well, one mother raised her hand and said “I have three children at this school. Your system doesn’t identify the child. How do I know which secretary to call if it is indeed an unmotivated absence?” And then another mother asked “Which phone number do you use for this?” The answer was “Your home number.” “At what time is this message sent?” “When the secretary leaves for the day. Around 4 p.m.” “You mean that you call my home to tell me of my child’s absence when my child is there to answer and I’m still at work?” Umm… okay… there are perhaps a few “bugs” to work out yet. But… I have an overwhelming sense that the problem the school was working to solve was not the larger “our” problem. It was theirs. And it still remains “ours” in particular and at large.

Jumping around a bit, after learning about the application process for “next year”, after learning about the many resources that are out there and available for our kids (that we are told about through our child’s “agenda” that is no longer called an “agenda” but something intended to mean “family resource”), after hearing how they have been following and guiding our children in their career choices for over a year now (and my heart singing “I know. I know. My son was enthusiastic last week!”), I came home. I spoke of all of this with my son.

I repeated what I had learned and I will admit that I couldn’t help but add that after the big speech about absenteeism and judging that our kids weren’t able to judge what was or wasn’t worthy of “our” time, I noticed that the director actually left the information session. He didn’t stick around to hear what we the parents were being told or what we the parents were asking. What was that about judgment? (And, yes, this really irked me.) And/but, despite and with everything, I was still feeling okay. I felt that my son and I had managed to catch what needed to be caught and that if he was aligned and enthusiastic and knew where he wanted to go, then it would all work out.

My son listened and then told me that during his day — also an information session about prep school — he learned that he is not taking the right math course for the program he wants to get in. I’m sorry but what was that?

So… this morning I called the school. I wanted to speak with the person who delivered the majority of the information to us last night — the school’s career coach — who said that we should call him if ever we had any questions. Okay. I have a question. (I actually have quite a fews questions but will, politely, ask what “we” can do about the fact that my son is in the wrong math class.) Then I remembered that he said that his phone number is in the “family resource”, the same “family resource” that happened to be at school with my son given that this is where the students are to write down all of their homework and “stuff”. So… I just called “the school”. My call was answered by the automatic school phone system. I reached the directory part. I spelled this person’s name and/but no phone number matched. I tried a bunch of variations. No luck. So I hung up. And I called the level secretary who didn’t answer (maybe due to my not being the only parent thinking about all of this today) but who had space on her voice mail. I left a message. I guess I’ll wait and see what happens (as the knot builds in my shoulder blades).

Our children are perhaps the first generation of beings that have been taught that respect is “earned” and politeness ought to be a “given freely” always. We have taught them that this — at its best — is a two-way street. And that someone who doesn’t respect us is maybe not respect-worthy. Have we – the parents – bothered to tell each other about this? Do we bother to even try and treat each other the same way?

To this, and this will be my last “aside”… during the last part of yesterday’s presentation (that only lasted a little over an hour in all), it was stated that “this last part” was only applicable to Sec. 5 students. The audience was split about 50/50 across Sec. 4 and Sec. 5 and with only, literally, minutes to go, half of the audience got up to leave while this last speaker was speaking and the Sec. 5 parents were trying to listen and the remaining Sec. 4 parents were being polite and respectful. And… we were, apparently, the “good” parents..

You know, sometimes I just don’t know. This is absolutely seriously hilarious. And tragic. And just plain “is” I guess. My son will be fine. He will be happy and he will succeed his life according to his own definitions of success. I am sure of this (excepting during some moments of panic that happen despite myself). And none of what I have written here will surprise him other than the fact that I apparently continue to be slow on the pick-up and my own learning that that’s just the way his/their world is. And/but… being slow to let things the matter to me go… why on earth do we seem to insist on tripping them and ourselves up on this at every opportunity?

And I write all of this knowing that my daughter, in Sec. 3, is part of the “new” school system call “The Reform”. With “The Reform” requirements for entrance into prep school have changed (or will be changed). And, notably, my daughter’s year is the first year of “The Reform” and will be the first year in which these new requirements will be put into place and applied.

Apparently there are more and stricter requirements for acceptance into prep school with “The Reform” which is odd given that this system is supposed to be tailored to each child’s learning (and abilities and progress.) Kids learning under “The Reform” have “auto-evaluation opportunities” instead of “exams”. (They actually seem to have many such opportunities only they happen during class time and not during the regular “exam time” that the “non reform kids” have :o) Anyway, wouldn’t it then make sense that such a tailored system (reminding me a bit of the Montessori schools in theory at least) would make it even easier to continue on? But… that’s my logic which is obviously not the logic that is running about (and running) “at large”. And perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself in my “upset”.

I’ll end this by writing that if/when our children manage to succeed, I truly hope that it’s by their definition. We, obviously, still have a quite a few things to work out with “ours”.