...Harsh headline, I know. But let me explain...

A couple of years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing insightful author and education consultant Ana Homayoun about her book That Crumpled Paper Was Due Last Week, which focuses on all the ways and reasons boys struggle in school, and offers tips and tools to help them succeed. In talking with her and reading her book, I thought it took some guts for a woman to focus a book (and a consulting career) solely on failing boys. Is it really just boys who are struggling? Should we lump them all together? Can we fairly call out one sex for "failing" and prescribe the solutions?

But it was clear that Homayoun was on to something. She had worked with a lot of frustrated/aloof/distracted/bored/disorganized boys and knew exactly what she was talking about (hey, talk to most teachers these days, and they probably agree with a blanket statement that boys are falling behind). 

If you ask T. what she wants to be when she grows up, she'll tell you "a scientist!" Then she will go on to qualify that and say, more specifically, that she wants to study marine biology. Awhile back I remember telling both kids that I had wanted to study zoology in college, but was held back from my aspirations because of math. To be fair, it wasn't math that held me back, but my reluctance to get my mind around it enough to push through the harder courses.

Math gives me a headache. I think I do have some type of learning disability when it comes to numbers, because I have trouble making sense of them in ways that go above and beyond simply not liking the subject. In school, math made me feel badly about myself. It made me feel thick-headed, and slow, and extremely frustrated. English, or language arts-centered classes, however, made me feel on top of my world.

When I teach developmental writing classes I always tell my students the story of my math challenges. I tell them I had to take the "remedial" math class in college, before I could move on to the first semester freshman math course. I tell them how I found myself caught in that avoidance cycle I see so often in my own students: I skipped class because I felt bad, which led to my poor grades, which led to more bad feelings, and more skipped classes. It was only with the help of my sister and a sympathetic and all-around great math professor that I was able to finally make some progress and turn the corner on my math anxiety.

L. had a presentation due yesterday in one of his elective classes. He doesn’t talk about schoolwork much (if at all) but he let slip mention of the upcoming presentation a few times these past two weeks--that's how I knew it was big. One time last week he asked me if he’d be in school that next Tuesday.

“Of course,” I answered.

“Great!” he said. “That’s the day of my presentation.”

We didn’t know much about the grading standards for the presentation. It’s an elective class, and all work for electives is supposed to be done at school. He’s been excited about the presentation, though, and I know this is why he wore his red and gray striped sweater on Tuesday. I have tried several times to talk to him about the content of his slideshow he prepared--on global superpowers, but he made it clear he had the topic covered.

When I picked him up after school yesterday I asked him how it had gone.

“Bad,” he said in the same non-commital, even-toned voice he uses for so much else. He's my inside-out child: disproportionately emotional and dramatic over light upsets, and even-toned and flat over the things that really matter. Yet I knew that under that flat tone he must have felt upset. I thought, not for the first time, how much easier it is to comfort a child who is visibly hurt and disappointed; you see the tears, you fix them.

His presentation had “too many words” the teacher had said, and not enough graphics. You could have done better, he said the teacher told him after class. What does that mean? Done better? How?

“It was boring,” L. told me.

“How do you know?”

“Because students did this” (here he made a loud groan) “and this” (he sighed heavily).

I was standing in walk-up line the other day and overheard a conversation between two moms of 1st graders at my son's school. They were discussing homework and, when I heard the word, I couldn't help but listen.

Were they complaining about too much homework? Problems with homework?

As it turned out, they were commiserating on homework battles. One mom is stressed, because her daughter is being difficult about doing her best job with her work. "She's so sloppy," she said to the other mom. 

Mom #2 nodded in understanding.

After dinner on Tuesday night, T. and I slipped out to walk the dog. This is our special time together, and we soaked up the quiet early evening, searched for figs on a neighbor's tree, and watched a red-winged hawk circle in the sky, high about the road. When we approached home again, though, I could hear raised voices from the driveway, and when I walked into the house I saw an over-turned wooden tray table in the hallway, and papers scattered all over the family room floor. The tension in the house was so palpable--overwhelmingly thick, like a hot and humid night. L.

By 10:00 on Wednesday, several friends had already e-mailed me the links to this story on a new study directed by the Motion Analysis Laboratory at Kennedy Krieger Institute in Baltimore, MD.