Unequal Childhoods - Annette Lareau [126]
INTERVENTIONS IN INSTITUTIONS
Wendy’s mother does not nurture her daughter’s language development like Alexander Williams’s mother does her son’s. She does not attempt to draw Wendy out or follow up on new information, such as the meaning of mortal sin. But, just like Ms. Williams, Ms. Driver cares very much about her child, and, just like Ms. Handlon, she wants to help her daughter succeed. Ms. Driver keeps a close and careful eye on Wendy’s schooling. Unlike Melanie’s mother, she is not forgetful with paperwork. She immediately signs and returns each form Wendy brings home from school and reminds her to turn the papers in to her teacher.
Debbie reminds Wendy, “Don’t forget to take those papers to school tomorrow.” To me, she explains, “They’re testing her again. So I had to sign papers to give my permission.” When I ask when the testing will happen, she says, “I don’t know when, but they’ll call us in there to go over the results and they’ll give us a written report of the results.”
Wendy is “being tested” as part of an ongoing effort to determine why she has difficulties with spelling, reading, and related language-based activities. Her mother welcomes these official efforts, but she did not request them. Unlike the middle-class mothers we observed, who asked teachers for detailed information about every aspect of their children’s classroom performance and relentlessly pursued information and assessments outside of school as well, Ms. Driver seems content with only a vague notion of her daughter’s learning disabilities. This attitude contrasts starkly with that of Stacey Marshall’s mother, for example. In discussing Stacey’s classroom experiences with field-workers, Ms. Marshall routinely described her daughter’s academic strengths and weaknesses in detail. Ms. Driver never mentions that Wendy is doing grade-level work in math but is reading at a level a full three years below her grade. Her description is vague:
She’s having problems . . . They had a special teacher come in and see if they could find out what the problem is. She has a reading problem, but they haven’t put their finger on it yet, so she’s been through all kinds of special teachers and testing and everything. She goes to Special Ed, I think it’s two classes a day . . . I’m not one hundred percent sure—for her reading. It’s very difficult for her to read what’s on paper. But then—she can remember things. But not everything. It’s like she has a puzzle up there. And we’ve tried, well, they’ve tried a lot of things. They just haven’t put their finger on it yet.
Wendy’s teachers uniformly praise her mother as “supportive” and describe her as “very loving,” but they are disappointed in Ms. Driver’s failure to take a more active, interventionist role in Wendy’s education, especially given the formidable nature of her daughter’s learning problems. From Ms. Driver’s perspective, however, being actively supportive means doing whatever the teachers tell her to do.
Whatever they would suggest, I would do. They suggested she go to the eye doctor, so I did that. And they checked her and said there was nothing wrong there.
Similarly, she monitors Wendy’s homework and supports her efforts to read.
We listen to her read. We help her with her homework. So she has more attention here in a smaller household than it was when I lived with my parents. So, we’re trying to help her out more, which I think is helping. And with the two [special education] classes a day at the school, instead of one like last year, she’s learning a lot from that. So, we’re just hoping it takes time and that she’ll just snap out of it.
But Ms. Driver clearly does not have an independent understanding of the nature or degree of Wendy’s limitations, perhaps because she is unfamiliar with the kind of terms the educators use to describe her daughter’s needs (e.g., a limited “sight vocabulary,” underdeveloped “language arts skills”). Perhaps, too, her confidence in the school