Ideas

James Keane is a student at Northwestern University

Emotional challenges in college are natural and normal

In November of 2012, I came home to East Grand Rapids, Michigan after the first few months of my freshman year at Northwestern. In doing so, I came home from the worst months of my life thus far.

As a self-proclaimed premed, I received a D on my first Chemistry 101 midterm and dropped out of the premed track. Having sung in my high school’s acclaimed a cappella choir for two years, I auditioned for seven Northwestern a cappella groups and received zero callbacks. For weeks, I was rejected from every one of the countless student groups to which I applied and interviewed, including NU Dance Marathon, which accepted over 100 students.

I met hundreds of students through various orientation programs, but I still felt socially isolated and misunderstood. I was pressed to name individuals who I could truly call “friends.” I struggled to match the fiercely cutthroat pace of Northwestern’s quarter system. And, surrounded by thousands of students equally intelligent, motivated, and Type-A as me, my most distinguishing personal characteristics were suddenly no longer unique. I felt one-dimensional and virtually void of a personal identity.

So to Michigan I returned, feeling like a failure in every major facet of my new life. I didn’t face diagnosable mental health issues, but I was in a dark place.

Yet, when asked “how I was liking Northwestern,” I would force a bright smile and say, “I love it.” I would dig my heels into the ground, pushing my back against a brimming closet of skeletons, and smile through gritted teeth. When people smiled back in response, I felt misunderstood by the only people who I had ever felt understood me.

As someone who my hometown expected to be successful, there was no room for me to come home as a failure.

So to my friends — especially those in EGR — who always thought I was “loving” college, I present to you my skeletons. After having stood among the “Top Ten” students with the highest GPAs at high school graduation, I talked with my parents about whether it was worth staying at Northwestern with such an alarmingly low GPA. After being voted by my high school peers onto Homecoming Court, I came home struggling to answer the prompt, “Tell me about your friends at Northwestern.” On the surface I may have seemed to have my life together, but in reality I was caught in a soul-crushing inferiority complex, feeling inadequate in every part of my collegiate life.

I write these things at risk of sounding presumptuous that my failures are shocking, and of sounding like I am pathetically enjoying the emphasis of my high school successes. That is absolutely not my intent. I also write these things with awareness that the “darkness” I faced in my freshman year of college could radiate like the sun in the face of darknesses others confront in their lives. Thus far, I have lived an incredibly easy, privileged, and charmed life.

But if my past issues can be dwarfed by those of others, then why don’t others feel empowered enough, comfortable enough, or welcomed enough to talk about their issues?

I am writing this to break what once felt to me like an impenetrable silence: the fact that as someone who others assumed would be “okay,” I was not doing okay. Life was not all good. Things were not going well. When my family assured me “things would get better,” I didn’t believe them. I was struggling. And now after talking with high school and college friends about their college experiences, I know that many of them also struggled. Some of them are currently struggling.

To high school seniors who will be freshmen in fall 2015, and to current college students — please know that facing emotionally crippling challenges in college is natural and normal. This notion may sound unhelpfully obvious and even hackneyed, but to me, it seemed like everyone around me was making friends, getting good grades, and excelling, while in reality, many of them were struggling in their own ways.

People in East Grand Rapids periodically manicure the truth for sake of saving face and protecting personal brands. I myself have done so. “Everything is great,” and “I/she/he love(s) (insert school name).” (Insert forced smile.)

And at Northwestern, given that students face similar levels of academic and social stress from the quarter system, a culture of compassion is difficult to cultivate. You may have two midterms tomorrow, but so do I, so you aren’t getting any sympathy from me. Layer a pervasive culture of competition on top of this, and it’s easy to find yourself living in a merciless pressure cooker.

In life, there isn’t always room or invitation to discuss what isn’t going well.

And that is simply not okay. While immense personal growth can arise from facing life’s challenges, and while self-sufficiency is important, emotional support, compassion, and understanding from others is crucial for one’s emotional and psychological health.

Today as a junior, I am lucky to be in a place where I feel absolutely embraced by my peers at Northwestern, where my academics are good, and where I am excelling in my own “distinguished” ways. Today, I can tell the truth when I say that I am loving my college experience.

But I didn’t always love it. And that’s okay. Struggling is a natural, healthy, and universal part of life. So let’s talk about it.

This article originally appeared on Medium.

xoJane.com is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded

While some people think of homeschoolers being sheltered or 'weird,' I actually have an incredibly normal life

Before we start, let me just lay it all out for you to set the stage: I’m a 20-year-old homeschool graduate with 7 younger siblings. No, none of us are adopted or step-siblings, we’re just one rather large biological family all born to the same 2 parents who have been married for 30 years now. I guess you could say that, especially in this day and age, we’re fairly non-traditional.

My parents married when they were 18 and 21, but I wasn’t born until nearly 10 years later. During that time, both of my parents had graduated with a bachelor’s in education and moved out into the work force – my mother as a schoolteacher and my father in the golf business. After I came along my mother went right back to teaching, entrusting me in the care of a sweet elderly friend during the daytime.

“Miss Mary” provided the best childcare they could have asked for – she treated me as if I were her own child and would write out daily reports for my mom about what I did during my stay with her so that she wouldn’t miss any special milestones. To this day, she is a dear family friend with whom we still keep up through letters and visits.

When I was around a year old, my mother decided that she was getting tired of handing over her own kid to someone else while she went off to teach other peoples’ children. She talked it over with my dad and decided to quit teaching in favor of being a stay-at-home mom. They downsized to allow for the reduced income, and wouldn’t you know it, right after she left her job they found out that they were expecting my younger brother.

To my mother, this sort of solidified that being a stay-at-home mom was what she wanted to do. And by the time I was ready to start kindergarten she had decided that, darn it, she really enjoyed being around her kids and just wasn’t ready to send me off into the world yet, so after another discussion my parents decided to try their hand at this thing called homeschooling.

Not forever, you see, but just until maybe the fourth grade or so and then they would send us off to public school. They both felt quite confident that they would be able to handle our educational needs up to at least this point.

Well, as you’ve probably guessed, the fourth grade came and went and suddenly my parents realized that, hey, this homeschooling deal was a pretty sweet gig. Still being in the golf business, my dad sometimes worked odd hours and didn’t get weekends off. Instead his day off was on Monday, and wouldn’t you know it, the principal of our little one-room school (*cough* MOM *cough*) had coincidentally decided that Monday would be our day off too!

Our education seemed to be on track as well – we could count and everything. (I kid, I kid. In reality, we all tested at well above grade level.) In addition, both of my parents had quickly realized the advantages that came with the ability to hand-tailor each child’s education to suit their needs. For example, I started reading lessons at age 5 with no issue, while my brother really struggled until age 7, when he suddenly took off and routinely tested at years above his grade level. Being able to give each child one-on-one attention and work through their individual scholarly roadblocks was a huge benefit.

My parents continued to homeschool me all the way through high school. When my mom found herself stumped by higher-level algebra, she simply ordered a curriculum that included a DVD with a math professor to teach each lesson. During my junior year, my parents granted my request to attend a small local co-op type school. It was a 3 days per week K-12 academy where I was the only junior, along with 2 sophomores and 5 freshmen. This gave me the opportunity to hone my writing skills, take chemistry from a pharmacist, and learn Spanish from a woman who had lived in Argentina for several years. I feel that this experience really helped to prepare me for college and for that reason I suggested that my parents encourage my brother to go during his junior year as well.

I decided not to return for my senior year, however, because I needed only 2 more classes to graduate high school and neither was offered through this venue. I was able to graduate a semester early and begin preparing for college.

Although I feel that being homeschooled was very beneficial in general, as with anything in life, it came with a few cons. For me, the biggest of these was a period of time where I didn’t really have any friends. I played soccer from ages 7-12, but after that age most kids in our small town were playing for the school’s teams, requiring the recreational teams to do extensive traveling for games. My family wasn’t able to keep up with that demand, so I had to drop out.

Additionally, we moved 7 hours away from my old home when I was 13, and it was very hard on me. I was shy and had a lot of difficulty making new friends, and it didn’t help that my family pretty much dropped all extra-curricular activities, including co-op, for a while in the aftermath of the move. Eventually we picked back up on activities and I was able to start making friends again, but it was a very difficult experience for me that led me to really push for my siblings to be involved in plenty of activities.

Overall, I feel that being homeschooled was an incredible opportunity that helped to set me up for success. After graduating from high school, I took the ACT and scored a 32, enabling me to apply to any college I wanted. Currently, I’m an art major at Oklahoma Christian University. I’m on track to graduate a year early in order to become a photographer and have been able to maintain a 4.0 GPA. Having an educational experience that was tailored to my needs and learning style has really helped me to flourish in the college environment, and I’m glad to have had that experience.

Although I know that some people think of homeschoolers in the context of being sheltered or “weird”, I actually have an incredibly normal life. I have an iPhone and a boyfriend, I wear makeup and shorts, I’m in a sorority, and I have short hair. I’m a member of MENSA, I’ve been a competitive cheerleader and gymnast, I run and lift, and I currently coach gymnastics both at a gym at school and one at home during the summer. In short, I’m just an average college girl who happened to have a non-standard education.

And now I’m sure you’re all wondering the same thing: will I do it for my own kids someday? Probably. I think my ideal situation would be to either homeschool while heavily involved in extra-curricular activities, or to have a very small co-op type academy such as the one I briefly attended to send my children to. While I know that I can never be completely certain of where life will take me, I would hope that I could someday offer to my own children the same benefits that my parents were able to offer me. I think my own experience has given me a unique perspective, and I hope to be able to use it when the time comes to give my kids what I had – only a little better.

Madison Hughes wrote this article for xoJane.

Joe Plumeri gave this commencement speech at New York Law School

xoJane.com is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded

"Even though I married at 21, I think it’s alright to wait, especially in today’s dating world"

Dating these days can be frustrating and confusing. With all of the technology, dating apps and hook-up culture, things can get complicated.

My friends and I usually try to help each other out when it comes to crushes, but at 22-23 years old, we are all relatively new to the dating world. We all have different opinions on how to approach it. That’s why I decided to take a step back and talk to someone with a little more wisdom: my 85-year-old grandmother.

I am extremely fortunate to have two healthy and loving grandmothers that are still alive today. Sometimes I get so caught up in my own life that I forget to call, or more importantly, forget to listen to the people who always have time to call and listen to me.

I’ve come to realize by talking with my grandmothers that older people are often more than willing to give great advice if we are willing to listen.

While visiting home recently, I had the time to sit down with my grandmother, Kitty, and hear her stories about dating and seek her advice. She was in Pi Phi at the University of Ohio and has tons of interesting stories. She said that because of the time period, there were tons of young men coming home from World War II and she had four or five dates a week.

Eventually, Kitty met my grandfather at a sorority mixer, and after he spent a year trying to get her to accept a date with him, she said yes. They were married for 59 years until my grandfather passed away. I can only hope to find a love like theirs. Maybe with her advice, we all can.

1. “Look for someone who is compassionate.”

The first things people seem to look for in a date (whether they know it or not) is how good-looking they are or what kind of job they have. While you can’t completely ignore these factors, it is also important to look for qualities such as whether or not they are polite to the waiter at a restaurant. Look for little signs that show they are a compassionate person.

2. “If you get involved in something you like, then you might meet someone who likes the same things as you.”

It’s hard to meet people. My grandmother met her husband when she was in college at Ohio State during a sorority and fraternity mixer. When I asked her about how to meet someone, she said to worry about yourself first. Don’t go looking for someone, but rather join clubs or groups that you are interested in and make connections through that.

She does not recommend trying to meet people at bars.“I think it’s sort of crazy you think you have to go to a bar to meet somebody. Sometimes you meet the wrong people there anyway.”

3. “Usually the boy should initiate the first date, but I think sometimes the girl can subtly initiate it by flirting.”

Well, there you have it boys, don’t be nervous — just ask her. And girls, help a guy out by dropping a couple of hints; you don’t just have to sit back and wait for him, but let him know you are interested.

My grandmother said she used to ‘flirt’ or ‘drop hints’ by making sure she was where he was and had the opportunity to talk to him. She also said to smile a lot.

4. “I think being ‘official’ or not, and labels and all that crap are too much of a worry. It should be just sort of something that happens between you and the guy or girl you like.”

Communication is key, and figuring out where you stand with the person you are dating is important. Talking about whether or not you can call someone your boyfriend or girlfriend shouldn’t be a point of stress.

Grandma says, “It just happens. You know you don’t want to go out with someone else—you are happy with the person you are with. But you don’t have to figure it out right away.”

5. “I remember a fun date I went on when we just went to dinner and then we played ‘Fox and Geese’ in the snow (Google it), and decided to come back to the house and put music on and we were trying different dances. And acting just silly. It was spontaneous.”

A first date doesn’t have to be at a fancy restaurant or expensive place, it just has to be fun. Maybe try and find out what the person you are taking out is interested in and do something along those lines.

Do they like music? Find a bar that has a live band to grab a drink. Google has plenty of date ideas. Just remember, too, that not everything has to be planned out but some of the best dates are spontaneous.

8. “If a guy asked me on a date over text, I would text back, ‘Let’s meet for a coke or something and we’ll talk about it.'”

I laughed out loud when my grandmother said this because I can totally see her doing it, but her words have some truth in them. She told me she would meet that person for a coke and then make them ask her on a date in person.

While maybe this isn’t always realistic in lives that are dominated by technology, we need to remember how much better it is to speak face to face than over text message. Grandma says, “Technology has changed things because you don’t hear someone’s voice anymore. Hearing someone’s voice and the feeling or tone of it on the phone is better than a text because then you can kind of feel what’s going on.”

9. “Why can’t your friends introduce you personally?”

When I asked her about dating apps, she just didn’t understand why people have to meet virtually instead of introducing one another. It’s okay to play matchmaker if you’ve got a bunch of single friends.

She says, “I know dating apps happen and they work. I just don’t like that stuff. But if you are sitting around and you haven’t met anybody and that might be something you could do.”

10. “Even though I married at 21, I think it’s alright to wait, especially in today’s dating world. You don’t get together half the time to date so no wonder it takes a while.”

Marriage is huge, so there is no need to rush into it until you’ve found the right one. When you do find the right one, don’t lose them!

11. “I think that you don’t have to see someone and say ‘Oh gosh, he or she is not very good looking, I don’t think I’m going to have fun with that person.’ Don’t rule people out so soon.”

With Facebook, dating apps and so much information readily available before you even go on a first date or meet the person, it is easy to rule people out.

Don’t be judgmental and be open to different people. You’ll never know what a person is really like until you give them a chance.

12. “Relationships are compromise and that’s kind of tough sometimes. Especially for me because I’m bossy.”

Perfection doesn’t exist. I hate to be a pessimist, but everyone you date will have something that eventually will bother you. They say you don’t know if you have a good relationship or not until you survive your first fight.

You just have to learn to work together to build a relationship; the long lasting ones don’t just build themselves.

13. “If you are in love with someone I think you just know that is the person you want to be with, you want to share things with and you know you are happy with them.”

I asked my grandmother, “What does love feel like?” and thought I would get a romantic answer of something along the lines of “flying” or “Your heart beats a million miles per hour.” But according to my grandma, the real kind of love is simple.

You know in your heart that you want to be with that person. It just feels right. Love makes you happy. She says, “There are different kinds of love—when you first get married there is a big romantic passionate kind of love, and then there’s a different kind of love, almost a deeper love. Love is something you have to work on.”

14. “Do what you feel in their heart is right and keep their head on straight. Be true to yourself, and don’t try and be someone else or fit the mold of who you think that person might like.”

Sometimes we are so desperate to find someone that we try and change who we are. This never works.

Besides, you don’t want someone to date you or fall in love with you who doesn’t know the real you.

And keep your head on straight; I guess that means don’t go out of your mind searching for love, it will find a way.

Charlee Dyroff wrote this article for xoJane.

xoJane.com is where women go to be their unabashed selves, and where their unabashed selves are applauded

Nostalgia has its place, but it must also be tempered with a reality check

In “What Would My Mom Do? (Drink Tab and Lock Us Outside),” Jen Hatmaker argues against the “precious” treatment of children in the 21st century and in favor of a more “free-range” style of parenting. Hatmaker discusses the levels of stress that mothers in particular create for ourselves by competing with each other, striving to provide bigger and better experiences for our children’s smallest achievements, and our refusal to let our children have the freedom to explore the world and learn from their own mistakes.

Hatmaker takes accurate and understandable punches at excessive birthday parties, elaborate classroom holiday parties provided by parents, and the provision of expensive video games, summer excursions and “stimulating activities for… brain development.” She argues that we are raising a generation that is discouraged from key skills of problem solving, creative thinking, or having to work for what they want, while also believing that they are the center of the universe whose wants trump all others.

I agree with Hatmaker that children today are catered to excessively, and the “mommy wars” perpetuate unrealistic notions of what we should be doing for and giving to our children, leading to significant stresses put on mothers who aren’t able to provide these things and experiences. Whether for financial or moral reasons, or just not being crafty or interested in devoting the time and effort into such elaborate displays of motherhood martyrdom, not every mother is going to parent the same way.

The cultural currency of shaming mothers who don’t center their children’s wants in everything they do is a significant disservice to both mothers and children. Children of the generation of my now 18-year-old son have certainly grown up feeling entitled to a great deal of individual attention and access to pricey items and experiences that were considered rare treats, if at all possible, when Hatmaker and I were kids.

When I was a child, a trip to Burger King happened maybe once every other month, and it was a big deal. Today children may eat out at fast food restaurants several times a week. Lest we assume this is only poor or lazy mothers who are giving in and judge them, we should recognize how many middle class parents ask their children, “What do you want for dinner?” and then follow the answer of “McDonald’s!” In my childhood we weren’t even asked.

In 2014 we as a nation witnessed numerous examples of police brutality and killings. Excessive police force and violence statistically happen far more frequently to Black and other non-white people, the mentally ill, developmentally disabled, and poor communities. I can’t help wondering about an essay written in 2015 that doesn’t take race and class factors into consideration. Hatmaker writes about parents who, if they are “run[ning] out and backfill[ing] eight antique trunks as a memorial to your third-grader’s life,” are probably solidly middle class, as she is.

In our communities, however, fear for the safety of our children leads us to keep them at home and indoors, even as we reminisce about the days we could wander aimlessly throughout the city. Today we are afraid of other parents, unknown neighbors, strangers, and the police who are supposed to serve and protect. The fears are hardly unfounded, but some people do not personally know the worst of these fears because their community is not the one at highest risk.

Hatmaker refers back to her own childhood to make the point that our generation was raised dramatically differently, with ample outdoor play, lack of supervision that forced us to work through differences with each other, and the opportunity to entertain ourselves in creative ways that challenged our minds and bodies.

I was born in 1974, good readers. It no more occurred to my mom to coddle us Precious Snowflakes than it did to quit drinking a case of Tab a day. If you told my mom to craft a yearly time capsule for each child to store until graduation, she would have cried tears of laughter all the way to Jazzercise.

I too was born in 1974, and had a Tab drinking mother who put us out of the house as much as possible. In fact, because I was a voracious reader and writer, content to sit in a chair by the window in my bedroom for hours at a time, my mom worried about my social skills and need for fresh air. She would regularly take the book out of my hands and tell me that I couldn’t have it back until I spent a few hours outdoors. My mother didn’t lock us out and we were required to tell her exactly where we would be at all times, but the other parents of the neighborhood were like Hatmaker’s mom.

While I agree that we over-coddle our children, cater to their every whim, and create undue competition and stress between mothers, all to our children’s detriment, there are some key pieces that Hatmaker does not seem to have taken into consideration. Specifically, the issues surrounding putting our children outside are fraught with contradictions and risks that impact certain families more than others.

In the early to mid-1980s when Hatmaker and I were growing up, neighborhoods were very different than they are today. My neighborhood was full of homeowners and only a few renters. The renters that were in the neighborhood rented entire family homes rather than smaller apartments and tended to stay for at least a few years. That is to say, I grew up attending elementary through high school with a large number of the same friends over the course of those years.

In such a neighborhood, everyone knew everyone. We knew as children that if we behaved inappropriately or wandered too far outside of the accepted zone, someone else’s mom would call our mom, or even drag us home to explain directly what we had been up to.

For the past 8 years I have lived in that same neighborhood again. The majority of homes are rental properties, and probably half of them have been broken up into 2 or 3 apartments. Most of my neighbors stay for only a year or two. We find it harder to get to know each other, harder to feel comfortable about our children being free-range in the neighborhood of strangers, and are generally less trusting as a society. As a single woman living alone, I don’t even feel secure that I could rely on my neighbors to come to my rescue if something terrible transpired. I don’t blame parents for feeling even less trust in the neighbors to look out for each other’s children.

We grew up in the era of “stranger danger” warnings. We were taught not to speak to strangers, not to take candy or anything else from them, and not to approach cars no matter what the adult in the car claimed, unless we recognized them. I grew up among hushed whispers of my mother and her friends discussing the abduction and brutal murder of Adam Walsh.

No effort was made to warn me that the elderly next-door neighbor whose house I cleaned might harm me. He was a nice old man and no one believes me to this day that he molested me for years.

In a neighborhood where most of us knew each other and parents recognized which house we belonged to, we were taught that if we saw anything amiss we were safe to approach the closest door to seek help. As a pre-teen I took advantage of this more than once to escape grown men who followed me as I walked home from the library or dime store; I would simply go to the door of a neighbor. I have a vivid memory of one friend’s father immediately running outside and threatening with a baseball bat a strange man who had followed me down the street.

Today, the police would pay a visit to my friend’s father following such an altercation and his life would be at risk for having looked out for me. Chances are high that a fellow neighbor would be the one who called 911 on a Black man wielding a bat on his own lawn but wouldn’t have paid any mind to the scared twelve-year-old-girl being followed down the street by a forty-year-old white man.

Today, I would forbid my teen daughter from approaching even a known neighbor if there were no women home. It is not because I would think my daughter is unable to problem-solve, but because I would have taught her about the very real “acquaintance danger” that is so prevalent in our current society.

Today, those of us who experienced trauma we couldn’t name at the hands of neighbors and family friends have grown into alert parents, aware that strangers are not the only danger to our children. We have also grown alert to how racism may result in the wrong person being faulted in a situation, to tragic ends, so we would rather avoid the situation.

We now live in a society in which there are institutional structures in place that underpin parents’ tendency to keep kids indoors and under a watchful eye. Recent stories about children being stopped by police while riding their bikes or accusations of neglect against parents for letting their child walk to the corner store or play in the park unsupervised would never have happened in my generation. In another story that was published the same day as Hatmaker’s essay, Lenore Skenazy shares another mother’s story, which is just one of three incidents the family dealt with in a few short months. This story demonstrates how systems are in place to force parents to become “helicopter” parents who cannot allow their children basic opportunities for play or age-appropriate exploration.

… youngest son (age 6) was accosted by an officer for riding his bicycle on the sidewalk in front of our house (our block is three houses wide — he was riding from one end of the block to the other)… He had apparently received a call from a ‘concerned citizen’ who had seen him riding. In this case, the officer was aggressive and frightened us into thinking we might actually have broken some law. A little research showed that we had done no such thing, but we were shaken.

When I was 6 years old, I was walking to school with my best friend, three blocks from home and across a main street. The idea that your child cannot ride their bicycle on their own sidewalk while you check on them periodically from the window isn’t stemming from over-cautious parenting but excessive systemic meddling. Parents are afraid of losing their children. The neighbors who call authorities out of a supposed concern seem disingenuous. If they are so worried, they could simply approach the parent to let them know of their concerns, or create a network of neighbors watching out for each other’s kids. The fact that the police take such calls seriously enough to scare children and reprimand parents speaks to a larger expectation to keep children penned in.

Hatmaker writes:

We made up games and rode our bikes and choreographed dance routines and drank out of the hose when we got thirsty. I swear, my mom did not know where we actually were half the time. Turned out in the neighborhood all day, someone’s mom would eventually make us bologna sandwiches on white bread and then lock us out, too. We were like a roving pack of wolves, and all the moms took turn feeding and watering us. No one hovered over us like Nervous Nellies.

Hatmaker is right: we had it better. I share her memories of riding bikes miles away from home, walking across town to the larger library with friends, and coming home just in time for dinner. I wish my son shared these memories, but he had a very different experience.

My son was limited to the back yard because of a grandfather who threatened to kidnap him, and my health not allowing me to sit outside to directly supervise his every movement. My son lived in a neighborhood where nosy neighbors called the police when his father came home from work and walked to the back door, claiming there was a “suspicious Black man” wandering up our driveway.

We live in a very different era than when we were kids, and in our nostalgia we also minimize the dangers we lived with then. My son grew up in an era after we discovered that statistically, children are more likely to be harmed by someone close to the family than by a stranger. At the same time, I can’t look back with rose-tinted glasses and forget that these strong neighborhood ties did not extend to my safety when I was being loudly berated, beaten, and abused in my home and going around the neighborhood with the bruises to prove it. Nostalgia has its place, but it must also be tempered with a reality check.

Parents may, in fact, be overprotective but they are reacting to newer cultural expectations and realities. We live in complicated times and solutions will also be complex and varied. We can look back to our childhoods not only in nostalgia but to ask what supports existed then that do not now. Getting familiar with neighbors and bringing back the Neighborhood Watch concept would be a great beginning.

We must also take a realistic look at our changing times and build solutions that are relevant to this new culture. Frank discussions in the neighborhood around issues of community policing, recognition of racial dynamics in policing, cultural exchange and respect, and mental health awareness can prepare neighbors to support each other better and look out for each other. It is possible to create safer neighborhoods for our children so they can get out and play the way we used to.

Aaminah Shakur wrote this article for xoJane.

Zocalo Public Square is a not-for-profit Ideas Exchange that blends live events and humanities journalism.

A new evaluation method shows promise in rebuilding trust between educators and those who are grading them

Imagine one morning, coffee in hand, you head to the website of your local newspaper, type in your name, and up pops how you rank in relation to your colleagues at work. The ranking is based on some mysterious statistical model but the message is clear—you don’t measure up. Now imagine the sting of public humiliation when you run into your neighbors, colleagues, and family later that day.

This was the reality for Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) elementary school teachers in August 2010, when the Los Angeles Times published a database with thousands of teachers’ names alongside a measure of how much “value” each had added to their students’ standardized test scores.

The fallout from the Times database, which relied solely on students’ math and English scores on the California Standards Tests, has been national in scope. The National Education Policy Center re-analyzed the data, using a different statistical model, and found that 54 percent of teachers in the Times’ database fell into a different effectiveness category. Calling the Times’ release “reckless,” the Center’s analysis joined a maelstrom of critiques and legal battles that continue today.

A notable calm in this storm is the near universal acceptance that teaching quality should be evaluated using multiple measures. These include observing teaching practice over time, asking students to report on the quality of their experience, and analyzing the rigor of assignments. The work of teaching is complex, as is the resulting arc of student learning. In order to capture what’s really happening in classrooms, we need a variety of tools to mitigate the error associated with any one measure. But, as schools and districts are discovering, the devil is in the details. Creating a system for collecting, analyzing, and using multiple data points to promote teacher learning and growth requires infrastructure, reliable measures, hours of administrative and teacher time, technical expertise, and, above all, faith and trust in the process.

Ensuring that faith and trust is no easy feat. Many teachers in Los Angeles are wary of the centralized systems under construction to monitor their performance and enhance their growth. The Times’ misstep was followed by massive LAUSD layoffs due to budget cuts, and, in 2012, by the acrimonious Vergara v. California lawsuit, which continues to focus public attention on how to fire bad teachers. In this context, it takes strength and courage to open up your classroom door and invite others in to evaluate the quality of your practice.

That’s just what a group of teachers at one Los Angeles public school is doing. For the past five years, teachers at the UCLA Community School, in the central city neighborhood of Koreatown, have been mapping out their own process of evaluation based on multiple measures—and building both a new system and their faith in it.

As one of Los Angeles’ 50 “pilot schools”—district schools with charter-like autonomy to innovate—this school is the only one trying to create its own teacher evaluation infrastructure, building on the district’s groundwork. As the school’s research director, I’ve helped support data collection and analysis, but the evaluation process is owned by the teachers themselves.

Indeed, these teachers embrace their individual and collective responsibility to advance exemplary teaching practices and believe that collecting and using multiple measures of teaching practice will increase their professional knowledge and growth. They are tough critics of the measures under development, with a focus on making sure the measures help make teachers better at their craft.

When it came to student surveys, for instance, teachers added questions that were open-ended, pressing students to explain how the teachers could improve. Students made a variety of helpful suggestions, such as asking for more explanation of math strategies. Teachers also received scores in areas such as academic challenge and classroom engagement, which were further broken down by student groups. For example, a simple bar graph allowed teachers to see whether struggling students felt as supported or challenged as their high-achieving peers. I met with a few teachers and was impressed to hear them reflect on how they could better reach failing students. One teacher was moved to tears looking at her scores, remarking, “These are my students talking to me.” Throughout this feedback process, I was struck by how much teachers appreciated external, trustworthy data on their daily practice.

In addition to student surveys, the school’s principal and assistant principal spent hours observing the teachers’ classrooms, documenting their instructional moves and practices and later debriefing what went well and what could be improved. Teachers also assembled a portfolio containing an assignment they gave students, how they taught this assignment, and samples of the student work produced. This portfolio was scored by educators trained at UCLA to assess teaching quality on several dimensions, including academic rigor and relevance. Teachers then completed a reflection on the scores they received, what they learned from the data, and how they planned to improve their practice.

After receiving these three different kinds of data—student surveys, observations, and portfolio assessments—almost all teachers reported in a survey that they appreciated receiving multiple measures of their practice. Most teachers reported that the measures were a fair assessment of the quality of their teaching, and that the evaluation process helped them grow as educators. But there was also consensus that more information was needed to help them improve their scores. For example, some teachers wanted to know how to make assignments more relevant to students’ lives; others asked for more support reflecting on their observation transcripts.

Perhaps the most important accomplishment of this new system was that it restored teachers’ trust in the process of evaluation. Very few teachers trust that value-added measures—which are based on tests that are far removed from their daily work—can inform their improvement. This is an issue explored by researchers who are probing the unintended consequences of teacher accountability systems tied to value-added measures (such as the formula used by the L.A. Times). For example, Harvard researcher Susan Moore Johnson cautions that value-added evaluation methods may reduce trust and undermine collaboration, affirming schools as egg-crate organizations where teachers work in isolation. We know that schools flourish when the adults inside are working together, not apart. Long-term research on school reform affirms the central role that relational trust and respect play in improving schools.

The L.A. Times database and other rankings miss the most important qualities of great teachers. They open their classroom doors and make their practice public. And they trust their colleagues and others to tell them when they are calling on some students over others, to point out when their lesson doesn’t challenge all students, or to suggest ways to enliven classroom discussions. Embracing and acting upon this sort of feedback takes courage and isn’t easy, especially in today’s education climate. But focusing public attention on teacher learning and betterment is the best route to restoring trust in teacher evaluation. That’s a story worth sharing with your neighbors.

Karen Hunter Quartz is research director at the UCLA Community School and a faculty member in the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. She wrote this for Thinking L.A., a partnership of UCLA and Zocalo Public Square.

Shane Parrish writes Farnam Street

"Most people can learn a lot more than they think they can"

Elon Musk recently did an AMA on reddit. Here are three question-and-response pairs that I enjoyed, including how to build knowledge.

He knows how to say I don’t know.

Previously, you’ve stated that you estimate a 50% probability of success with the attempted landing on the automated spaceport drone ship tomorrow. Can you discuss the factors that were considered to make that estimation?

Musk: I pretty much made that up. I have no idea :)

Everyone has that one teacher…

I’m a teacher, and I always wonder what I can do to help my students achieve big things. What’s something your teachers did for you while you were in school that helped to encourage your ideas and thinking? Or, if they didn’t, what’s something they could have done better?

Musk: The best teacher I ever had was my elementary school principal. Our math teacher quit for some reason and he decided to sub in himself for math and accelerate the syllabus by a year.

We had to work like the house was on fire for the first half of the lesson and do extra homework, but then we got to hear stories of when he was a soldier in WWII. If you didn’t do the work, you didn’t get to hear the stories. Everybody did the work.

Finally, his answer on building knowledge reminds me of The Five Elements of Effective Thinking and the latticework of mental models.

How do you learn so much so fast? Lots of people read books and talk to other smart people, but you’ve taken it to a whole new level.

Musk: I do kinda feel like my head is full! My context switching penalty is high and my process isolation is not what it used to be.

Frankly, though, I think most people can learn a lot more than they think they can. They sell themselves short without trying.

One bit of advice: it is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree — make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.

Follow your curiosity to Elon Musk Recommends 12 Books.

This piece originally appeared on Farnam Street.

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