Tag Archives: curriculum

Why UPK is a Bad Idea

Posted on by Amy Pybus
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Everyone’s all abuzz about President Obama’s mention of universal preschool (UPK) in his state of the union address. I’m totally against it, and it’s shocking all the people who know me as a dedicated early childhood professional.

But Amy, don’t you love the little children? Don’t you think they deserve the best start they can get? As an early childhood educator (ECE), don’t you agree this is a long time coming and should be a natural next step?

As an early childhood educator, I know what happens when government gets involved in education. It’s not pretty.

But before I begin on early education, let’s look at our track record with our existing school system. Which, globally, ranks somewhere in the middle. Just average, in the richest and most powerful nation on earth.

There are a million reasons for this, but I’ll just go on my family’s experience. Like the rest of the nation, my kids are getting a mediocre education. They’re being standardized-tested to death. They don’t have recess so they can have more test prep time. We’ve only been able to keep a music program because the music teacher is also the gym teacher. And THAT’S because my town is down fourteen teachers this year. I’m not talking luxuries here. We haven’t asked for an iPad for every student. We. Need. Teachers.

That’s not an outrageous expectation, is it?

So let’s apply this winning formula to preschool. In the decade I’ve been in this field, the more that “education” creeps into the picture, the less real care for children remains. That’s why I don’t like education reform in the manner it’s done today. Because as an ECE, I know what kids really need to learn, and it’s usually the opposite of what education reformers think it is.

When the regulations come down, they require child care providers to have degrees. I have seen my field be quietly but systematically stripped of some of the wisest, kindest, most sympathetic and caring teachers because they didn’t have college degrees.

These are the women who taught and helped me when I entered the field. I am living proof: you can NOT learn what you need to know to work with children in a college classroom full of adults. As my kindergarten teacher aunt said, “Amy, they’ll eat you alive.” She was right, and I had to learn the hard way, almost not making it past my third year. I had a master’s in education but was totally unprepared to work with children.

Some people are convinced that accreditation is the best route for ensuring quality programs. My kids went to the best preschool I’ve seen in my experience. But the director was forced to close after becoming nationally licensed, only to find out that the amount of work required to maintain that status cost too much to run her business.

Our closest relative to UPK, Head Start, is failing, with 100,000 children being cut out of the program this year. When the budgets come down and my child care friends are shocked at the programs we’re losing, I always remind them: Women and children first!

Add to all this the simple problem of staffing. A child care center is expected to provide nine to ten hours of care for an eight-hour working day. The pilot UPK program now being run in Massachusetts requires the same full-day, full-year services.

Think for a minute about how long schools are staffed. Half of a year, for six hours a day. And we are barely keeping them alive as it is.

So we would be asking our preschools to be something between a child care and a school, but so much more. Where will the staff come from? Child care worker is still one of the lowest-paid professions in the country, making less than minimum wage in some areas.

On top of her normal child care duties (which is enough work to kill an ox), a Head Start provider must do hours of paperwork, plan individual curriculum for each child, perform assessments and plan goals, meet with parents on a monthly basis, and have a state employee review her curriculum and facility every other month. For all this extra effort she earns an extra $8.40 per day. This is shameful.

I don’t even have the space to get into curriculum changes and the impact on programs – and the children they serve – here. I still have some semblance of control over my little world, and I’m holding onto it for dear life.

The fact that I can even let my kids swing is in jeopardy, as I’m barely allowed to keep my grandfathered-pre-new-regulations swingset. I won’t be surprised if they make me remove it after the next round of changes. And then I’ll tell the kids, whose best interests have been served, that the swings are just too dangerous and scary.

We, as a country, have never had the money to back up government mandates. Period. So our schools, preschools, and Head Starts struggle under the burden of unfunded regulations that can’t possibly be maintained. How is any of this, in any way, good for the little children? In fact, I do love them. That’s why I try to protect them from a system that puts their real, true educational needs last.

Many people have pointed out that we can only move forward with a first step, and Obama simply took the first step. That’s great. Of course kids deserve a real education and more than just pipe dreams being used as filler in political speeches. I hope that this will be done the right way someday. But let’s fix the educational system we have now before we drag our four-year-olds into the debacle.

Big Bird is Saved!

Posted on by Amy Pybus
4

As I was looking around my child care room today I noticed exactly how many ways PBS is part of my life – literally on a daily basis.

Miss S got me started. She picked up my Oscar toy and asked what it was for. I said, “When those men were running for President, one of them said he would get rid of ‘Sesame Street.’ But he didn’t win, so I put Oscar out to celebrate.”

She said she knew, and started speaking quite eloquently about it. I’ve had her since she was two – I forget she’s in second grade now and can comprehend things.

She told me that a boy in her class talked about it because his mother works for PBS. I said, “He must have been afraid that his mother might lose her job.”

She nodded, very serious. Then she asked, “No PBSKids?” Which is one of her favorite things to play on the computer, and it’s one of the ways I entertain her when the littles are napping.

I said yes. Then Younger Son asked, “There’d be no Wild Kratts?” and I was actually a bit stricken.

Through their shows, the Kratt brothers have stoked my son’s love for everything wild. He is obsessed with nature and all its creatures and how to preserve it. In fact one of the things he wants to be when he grows up is someone who “travels the world and helps animals.”

So with this conversation in my mind, I began to pick out all the things I see every day that came from PBS.

This poster came with my “Mr. Rogers Plan and Play” curriculum book. Most of the time I forget it’s there, like everything that eventually blends into the walls, but whenever I do notice it I get a smile.

I made this t-shirt for my sister but she’s not sure she can wear it in public without offending people. It’s a nightshirt now. (For those of you who don’t remember, it was “The Electric Company” teaching us about tolerance. What nonsense PBS fills kids’ heads with!)

I found this gem in a library book sale and as soon as I opened the book I remembered the pictures from reading them as a child. It was a visceral reaction.

OK I’ll just say it. I was screaming at the book sale and embarrassing my children.

On Monday of this week we listened to “Songs From the Street” while we were using Play-Doh. I used the Frontline website to research an education article the other day, and recommended a Nova documentary about doctor-assisted suicide to a friend. The list is practically endless.

I don’t know if the President even has the ability to eliminate PBS. But I’m just so glad we don’t have to find out.

By the way. Best children’s book ever?

Babies Who Teach Themselves

Posted on by Amy Pybus
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I took this amazing video of one of my babies a few weeks ago, but sadly I can’t post it here. I was hoping to but I’d have to pay WordPress $60 for the option. I haven’t bought myself new work shoes in over a year. The video option ain’t happenin.

So picture if you will: a nine-month-old baby sitting on the 4′ X 5′ patch of wooden floor between the playroom and livingroom. He has a plastic pot from the cooking set and he’s bouncing it around on the floor. It’s spinning and rolling around, making a cool popping noise.

The edge of the carpet in each room delineates this perfect play space, because when the pot hits either rug, it stays close. Every time it stops moving he scoots over to grab it. He throws it again and the cycle begins anew (except when he takes occasional breaks to chew on it).

He does this for about half an hour every day, I’m not kidding. He’s totally focused, not paying attention to or even interested in whatever chaos is going on around him. He’s just totally zeroed in on that pot. It’s very zen, to be honest. I love watching him do it.

As I watched him I realized he was hitting about a dozen learning targets in just this simple action. He’s getting hand-eye coordination, learning to recognize sounds, working on both small and large motor skills. He’s entertaining himself – not only is that a small miracle for a nine-month old, but that’s what you call self-directed learning.

About a week after he started doing this, he was crawling.

Can you imagine? All the amazing things going on in his brain during those quiet moments, all the growth he’s experiencing with this “child’s play.” To the casual observer it would seem like nothing, but I guess it’s true what they say – play is children’s work.

And how can I quantify this on a report? If I write “Mr. W played with a cup for half an hour” I’d look totally negligent. Yeah, I left some trash on the floor and when he found it he had something to play with… As my husband would say, here come the people with the clipboards.

But any smart grownup knows the box is the best part of the new toy.

This One’s for My FCC Ladies

Posted on by Amy Pybus
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I was having a great little chat with Famous Carol the other day about the state of family child care. She subs for several other women and shares my worry that home day care providers are a dying breed.

Between us we know several home day cares in the area that are closing. Maybe more parents are choosing centers. But it might be that for some people the workload is starting to outweigh the rewards. Carol pointed out how sad it is that we’re becoming more and more institutionalized.

It really hit me hard when she said, “It used to be like dropping your kids off at Grandma’s house for the day.”

That just sounded so sweet, and I would love to have that kind of house. It’s getting harder to maintain that family atmosphere with all the requirements we have to meet. I have to admit that I barely skate by as it is, especially since I just started a four-month-old who needs to be held a lot (as all babies do).

So I got into my usual funk of comparing myself to other providers and coming up short. Carol told me to stop being hard on myself (she knows this is what I do). She tells me if the kids are happy I’m doing a great job. Well, they’re happy a lot of the time…

But then the very next day a funny thing happened. My after-schooler went to girl scouts, two kids stayed home sick, and another got picked up early with a fever. I was left with just three girls for the afternoon and quickly realized I had a lot of time on my hands.

As we came home from the school pickup (I still had my own son to get, don’t forget about him) I said, “Instead of me making a snack for you guys, how about we bake our own together?” YEAH!!! They ran in the kitchen. “Amy remember when it was Miss A’s birthday and we make cupcakes?” “Remember I got the egg on my hand and I cried?” “Do we still have the halloween holders?” (Cupcake wrappers. Yeah, it’s been a while since we baked.)

And in a strange twist, Older helped us while Younger played video games. It was delightful for me, first to see him bonding with the kids instead of being annoyed at them (his usual state), but also because I don’t think he’s made muffins with me since he was about five years old.

So when I don’t have a four-month-old plus five other kids plus an after-schooler plus my own two kids, I am really damn good. And it’s not that hard.

Today I was down to one at the end of the day with half an hour before her dad came to pick her up. I asked if she would be scared if I vaccuumed. She said yes but I tried it. She covered her ears and watched me. I said, “Do you want to try it?” An old trick to get kids over being scared of the monster.

She jumped at the chance. Of course it’s too heavy for her to push so I took the hose off and showed her how to magically suck up the cracker crumbs and popcorn pieces. She was delighted.

While she sucked up the snack detritus from under the table, I used the dustpan on the hardwood floor. We knelt side by side and she giggled hysterically every time the vaccuum hose sucked up her dress. It suddenly felt a little old-fashioned to me and I thought, this is like grandma’s house.

Until she thought it would be fun to see if the vaccuum would suck up her sock. That thing was whipped off her foot and up the hose faster than I could even blurt out one word in response.

It was kinda funny.

Then it was more like Grandpa’s shop than Grandma’s kitchen, and the boys were back to see me doing surgery on the vaccuum, and then they all played jumprope with the hose (which I had to remove), and Older showed me how they learned about waves in science class by sending jolts of different size and speed down the length of it, and Miss M had a chance to use the screwdriver, and I had to stick my fingers into the bag to fish out the sock. (Gross.)

But we got it straightened out. And the whole scene was something I don’t think you’d see in a center. Hang in there family child care providers – the children of the world need us.

Blog Posts: Vacation Edition

Posted on by Amy Pybus
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It’s a holiday week (yeay) which means I won’t get any work done, so I have some quick updates instead.

First, take a look at this excellent and moving blog post by my friend, Jennifer Levi, reflecting on the transgender rights bill that was passed in Massachusetts last week.

Also, I have a new Gazette article taking aim at a pretty easy target: the Penn State debacle. But am I taking a cheap shot, or speaking the truth that no one else can afford to?

And the brandy-new post I just included below, originally featured on OwnaDayCare, which started quite an interesting debate over curriculum standards. I feel they’re too high, and I’m reminded of it every time I attempt a curriculum project (such as the handprint turkeys we made today while one child who doesn’t like projects threw a tantrum, and one really did a good job, and one painted the entire table with glue, and we all got frustrated and/or bored at some point during the course of the activity).

Happy Thanksgiving to all.