on the joys of sending my children to public school

Oh, the joy...
The learning support teacher at my son's school just called to ask for my help in trying to motivate him to do his work... he just doesn't want to do it. I am at a loss, I "motivate" him through our attachment bond, I'm not supervising between 10 to 20 other kids at the same time.

Meanwhile, my stepson's teacher, who corresponds via email with all the parents of her students, shared some information she learned at a talk during a professional development day in October. The speaker was a "brain based learning facilitator" She shared some of her notes, including the following gem:

Children have to be constantly learning.  If they are not learning their brain is not growing. Give them chores. Penitentiaries are full of people who never had chores. 

Perhaps it's time to review my text and notes from that 2nd year Psych class I took on Cognition, but aren't we ALL always learning? Isn't that just the way our brains work?
Another lovely gem was the following:

Never allow children more than one hour of t.v. or video games a day, it "rots the brain" with electronic sedation.  The flashing pictures take away your "captain", your thinking brain and cause mental passivity and lack of creativity.

So, I'm imagining the "captain" she is referring to is our frontal cortex, home of "executive functioning" (to use medical and psychological lingo). From what I've learned through my university studies, executive functioning is a part of "meta cognition" i.e. thinking about one's thinking, or even just a mental awareness of one's own thoughts. She offered to share the resources he provided, and I'm all over that. I'd like to see the studies/experiments that came to these conclusions - because I don't buy the hypothesis.

From my own experience, the "flashing pictures" on the tv screen don't really prevent ME from thinking. Why, just the other day I was watching the 'boob tube' (as my mother called it while I was growing up), and I saw a commercial protesting an upcoming 'tax' on local tv by the big American networks. My immediate thought was, "why is this important news to us mainstream North Americans? Why don't we care about 4th world (a term taken from George Manuel's 1974 book on the realities of being a stateless nation within a colonial country bound on assimilation and cultural extinction) issues, Indigenous issues? Why are we protesting the rising cost of tv, rather than America's Imperial wars, or the political hypocrisies in many African nations? I could go on, but my point is, I kept thinking, despite those flashing lights. Maybe that's because I have a mature brain, and kids are incapable of this because their brains are still developing, but I certainly watched a lot of tv growing up, and my brain works...

And I really fail to see how the "flashing pictures" of video games prevents my children from thinking. Don't they need to utilize problem solving skills to get past each obstacle? They can't continue to do the same thing over and over and expect different results... and, of course, they don't. They try something else, or they ask my husband for help.

In reply to my email requesting the references she had offered, the teacher wrote the following:

He said that they use very fast moving stimulus to cause the thinking brain to shut down. He said any child watching/using more than an hour a day was also susceptible to depression.  I also saw the good things many children miss when they spend great amounts of time at the t.v. or computer, developing oral language, problem skills, socializing.

I recently posted some unschooling resources on video games being GOOD for your brain on my Facebook page, starting with Sandra Dodd's website. (The first link no longer seems to take you to the article, unfortunately). A good friend commented, saying that her son, who attends a French school, learned to read English in kindergarten by playing video games. As well, most kids I know use video games to socialize. They play the games together, they talk about the games together, they help each other out when they get stuck.

And the point about being susceptible to depression... yeah, I think depression is a BIT more complex than that.

Regardless, she writes that I am doing a good job with my stepson, and she is really enjoying having him in her class this year. However, I let that kid play his Nintendo DS for hours all weekend long, simply because they want to.