For this week's podcast, our friend Kathy Ceceri subbed in for Amanda, who was busy at SXSWedu, for a chat on standardized testing, pushing your kid, and all those things schools and parents are doing wrong. And since it's Friday the 13th, our recording was unluckily haunted by a variety of unwanted sounds, including answering-machine messages and my son talking to his computer. But no dogs barking! Catherine's dogs outsourced the disturbances.
As for the part of the podcast we really do want you to listen to, we discussed those all-too-frequent standardized tests, the anxiety they cause for kids, the complications of opting out, and what value standardized evaluations have for non-standardized kids. Next, we chatted about the various ways parents try to motivate kids to do well, if not on standardized tests then on report cards and in college and in life. We considered the merits of bribing, rewarding, pushing, and letting kids set their own goals and hoping for the best. Of course, if your child's future path isn't clear to you, it's not so easy to know which way to push or pull.
Finally, we made our recommendations for the week: Catherine shared a post on Alphamom about the difference between rewards and bribes and her own post on helping kids compete to excel rather than compete to beat; Kathy mentioned a Cognoscenti post on why it might not really matter what college your child goes to that got some attention on her All About Homeschooling Facebook page; Nicole said you really should be listening to the Inclusive Class podcast, which has enough episodes waiting in the archives to last you quite a while; and Terri suggested some questions to ask about standardized tests, an article that takes Dancing With the Stars way too seriously, and an interview with a regular watch by Linda Holmes on NPR's Monkey See blog.
Thanks as always to Jon Morin for producing our episode and Kristin Eredics for our happy in-and-out music. (If you're reading this description somewhere without hyperlinks, come to http://parentingroundabout.com for the full recap experience.)