how do i convince my husband
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how do i convince my husband
| Mon, 07-18-2005 - 4:09pm |
how do i convince my husband to let me at least job-share so i can take care of our 3 month old dd? he grew up with his mom working & all his friend's moms working. we can afford it if we cut back on some things, but he doesn't want to cut back & just doesn't understand someone wanting to be a stay at home mom...it doesn't help mycause that the grandmothers will babysit. i'm so unhappy about having to go back to work...he wants me to work full time 1 more year & just doesn't get it! i feel like my heart is being ripped from my chest every time i hink about it.

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I don't think she is following her dd around calling everything she does homeschooling. (That would be what I did in my spoof.) I do think she is artificially recreating school during the times when it is more appropriate to be LIVING LIFE and BEING A CHILD. Have you been reading her outlines of ongoing summer educational activities? I don't know about you but I get this funky image of this child locked in a dark basement with a boxful of books, stacks of worksheets, a tattered globe, and mom standing at the top of the stairs lightly tapping the "enrichment incentive" whip against her hand.
(I could be way off; I haven't read the whole thread, just going on what I know of momofhk from the past and these homeschool curriculum posts.)
"We got in one of the worst fights of our marriage when he insisted that we use our week of vacation time actually to GO to Punxutaney for his 30th birthday"
OMG! That is one of the most hilarious things I've heard. Now that is what memories are made of (even if you suffered at the moment...what a story to tell your DS!!)
I hope there is some level of exaggeration here because if not I am getting a very Dead Poet Society vibe...lol! "Seize the day boys...make your lives extraordinary!" Except there are still 2 worksheets to complete ;)
I was a very late academic bloomer. My parents never pressed me to do *anything* outside of school. They were great readers themselves so it was what was natural to me. Most of what I remember of childhood was discovering things entirely on my own. The first book I ever bought was "The Little Prince" (in Spanish) because I liked the cover. No one quizzed me on it or put it on my "summer reading list" I saved up my money until I could buy it and then took it to my "private" reading place to read and re-read like it held the secrets of the world;)
I used to tell my Mom that as soon as I had a book "assigned" at school I lost all interest in it. LOL!
LOL! You? I don't know!
What I meant was the general idea of a kid having so many expectations from a parent that they don't get the chance to indeed "seize the day"...their lives are so structured that they have never experienced that kind of freedom.
Since I was always involved in "gifted" programs and such I saw up close the burden that having these expectations can put on a kid. I remember my friend who HATED piano but was forced to practice two hours a day after school. Her mom was always putting her in some enrichment program. She was always worried about getting a "B" because that was unacceptable.
I was a perennial drop-out of activities because my parents were like "if you don't like it then don't do it...at least you gave it a shot" and in the end I found my particular passions on my own. Half the time my parents never looked at my report card.
I couldn't tell if you were saying that I was exaggerating and that I was full of Dead Poet Society crap, or something completely different.
It's okay if someone thinks I am full of DPS crap. I'm not doing flashcards and worksheets with my kids while we still have our cannonballs and belly flops to perfect and forts made out of Barney sheets to make. (And I'll be hiring Dogma's next husband to clean up the DPS crap anyhow...)
(For those who read everything, I apologize for the rampant attempts at gratuitous wit and humor lately. My dh is far away, off climbing a mountain and I am left here desperately trying to garner admiration of any sort. My kids are so over me. I'll try to put a lid on it.)
"Sorry, I can't "fight" you on your particular language acquisition stuff. I think the situation you have with your children is so totally different than the Polish child dropped into rural Missouri that it can't be compared."
I'm not really looking for a "fight" on this, but I've spent a lot of years dealing with multilingual issues on many different levels and her arguments just struck me as very odd. I've started off my post with this sentence because it also struck me as a very interesting comment to make. Can you perhaps elaborate on why you think my children's situation is not comparable to the Polish child dropped in Missouri? That is an extremely broad statement to make. I know that our situation is different from some other families I know, but it has less to do with language and location than individual family circumstances. In any case, my experiences with multilingualism are far broader than just my own family. I know families from all over the world with very different circumstances and varying degrees of "success". In addition, ds and dd's school is more than half immigrant children (many from poorer families). I wasn't basing my questions and criticisms solely on our particular situation, but on a broad experience with multilingual children over a 10 year period.
" Because if parental influence were so predominant, it would be almost impossible for a child to learn a new language (one not spoken at home) without an accent."
This one simply doesn't make sense to me. I really can't understand what parental vs. peer influence has to do with accentless language acquisition. For the vast majority of teenagers (the ones I would argue most influenced by peers), accentless language acquisition is far more difficult than for children under the age of 7 or 8 (or 10, there is some debate about where the cut-off is). In other words, a child who attends perhaps 20 hours of school at the age of 6 and the rest of the time with parents (thus spending the vast majority of time still with parents and not at an age where peer influence is so dominating) will learn accentless ML (majority language). The teenager who spends the vast majority of time with his/her peers (and who usually cares a great deal more about peer influence and fitting in) is far less likely to be able learn to speak the ML without an accent. If her theory about peer influence (and lack of parental influence) being key for accentless language acquisition were correct then it should be the other way around.
Basically, it's not about parental or peer influence or lack of either, it's about exposure to a second language at a time when the brain still can process it in a certain way. Younger children who learn 2 languages simultaneously (or within a few years of each other) "store" the language in the brain differently than older children and adults who learn another language later on. For younger children, all of the languages are stored in overlapping areas, for older children and adults different languages are stored in entirely different areas of the brain. Even more to the point, most children over a certain age lose the ability to hear the subtle differences in intonation and pronouciation. A teen may be down-right desperate to speak accentless English in order to fit in with his peers and simply lack the ability.
I found the discussion about the ASL kids very interesting! My personal gut feeling is also that children will learn given the desire and opportunity regardless of parents' wishes....
" I refresh my memory and flip through the book, the main reason Harris mentions that case is because it points out how children do this thing called code-switching, where children learn one set of behaviors and rules (and perhaps language) to use at home and another to use Out There."
I suspect that Harris hasn't looked at the last 20 or so years of research into bilingualism. In any case, she is completely misusing the term "code-switching" in the context of bilingualism. Code-switching simply refers to the switching between two languages. It has nothing to do with any kind of set of behaviours and rules learned at home vs. Out There. Every multilingual child I know is perfectly capable of using their multiple languages in any kind of environment, even switching to another language with children and adults who also speak that language (in other words, they can also use more than one language with a particular person, switching between languages depending on their mood, who started which language first etc. etc.) . The switching between the languages is code-switching regardless of where it happens or why and is not usually rigidly structured based on time, location or even person.
"They have two separate storage tanks in their mind, each contains stuff learned within a particular social context. So if you learned algebra in French and Calculus in English, you'd do algebra in French and calculus in English. It works for emotions as well. (A woman who spoke only Chinese with her parents found that when she was in graduate school she couldn't speak about "big ideas" in Chinese with her parents because she didn't have the vocabulary and she only spoke with them about loving thoughts and light topics like the weather up til then.) "
Multiple language acquisition and use, particularly in the case of young children, simply doesn't work this way. A lot of these theories have been discredited years ago. There is a lot of evidence for transfer of skills from one language to another. The child who learns to read in one language first will require much less time to get up to speed in reading in another...the skill simply transfers to the new language once basic phonetic information has been acquired. Similarly, children who grow up doing math in one language don't have to re-learn the math (or parts of math) in another as long as they have been exposed to the correct vocabularly. The skills they learned in one language tranfer to the other language as long as the vocabulary is in place. There is evidence that the children with parents who are better educated and speak a more sophisticated version of the home language are more likely to acquire a "better", more sophisticated version of the school language. In other words, good skills in language comprehension and reading at home tend to translate into good skills in language comprehension and reading at school.
The case of the Chinese woman is sad but has absolutely nothing to do with "two seperate storage tanks" and everything to do with a lack of vocabularly that she could have chosen to acquire. Sure, it would have been a struggle to learn new words in the beginning, but she could have learned the words needed to carry on that kind of conversation with her parents. If language really worked like this, I would never have been able to acquire proficiency in scientific language in Swedish and German. I studied Biochemistry/Biology entirely in English in the U.S. Nevertheless, I acquired the ability to work on a scientific level in both Swedish and German as an adult. Children growing up with those languages would have even less difficulty transferring their knowledge and skills to the other language regardless of which language they first learned it in.
"The chapter where she talks about language and immigrants is one in which she is trying to point out that "normal people may behave differently in different social contexts but they carry the memories from one context to another. If they learn something in one situation, they do not necessarily make use of it in another." "
In the context of language acquisition, she is simply wrong. There is too much evidence that skills and ideas are regularly transfered between languages. The impression I have is that Harris has a very superficial (and rather out-dated) view of multilingualism. It's probably not a big deal in the context of her book overall, but it does make me inclined to wonder if she has an equally superficial view of other issues discussed in her book.
Edited 8/9/2005 5:29 am ET ET by laura_w2
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