Tag: children

If only I could write like her…

justjenLeave a comment

I’ve been pretty good about working ahead and scheduling for Sunday so I could remain unplugged one day of the week. Unfortunately, this week got away from me and here I am, Sunday morning, hooked up to the internet, breaking one promise to myself so as to keep another and publish something every day for sixty days.

So I’m going to share an essay from Carol Black. Oh, if I only could write like her! I reread this essay this morning trying to pull the most profound quote to share with you, so you’d be compelled to click the link and read the whole thing. I got caught up again in her beautiful prose that wrenches at my emotions.

Every essay she writes is heartbreaking and beautiful. Every paragraph is so elegantly persuasive; it feels impossible to choose just one passage to pull out and highlight, so know as you read this teaser know that the entire piece is equally compelling:

When we first take children from the world and put them in an institution, they cry.  It used to be on the first day of kindergarten, but now it’s at an ever earlier age, sometimes when they are only a few weeks old.  “Don’t worry,” the nice teacher says sweetly, “As soon as you’re gone she’ll be fine.  It won’t take more than a few days.  She’ll adjust.” And she does.  She adjusts to an indoor world of cinderblock and plastic, of fluorescent light and half-closed blinds (never mind that studies show that children don’t grow as well in fluorescent light as they do in sunlight; did we really need to be told that?)  Some children grieve longer than others, gazing through the slats of the blinds at the bright world outside; some resist longer than others, tuning out the nice teacher, thwarting her when they can, refusing to sit still when she tells them to (this resistance, we are told, is a “disorder.”)  But gradually, over the many years of confinement, they adjust.  The cinderblock world becomes their world.  They don’t know the names of the trees outside the classroom window. They don’t know the names of the birds in the trees.  They don’t know if the moon is waxing or waning, if that berry is edible or poisonous, if that song is for mating or warning.

Here’s the entire article: On the Wildness of Children.

Educating Freedom

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Some good friends of mine, a tight-knit family with parents in human support fields, both working with adults who are struggling to function (imagine that) were telling me how difficult it is to drop their 5-year-old daughter off at kindergarten. She screams and resists and they pretty much have to drag her into school.

Red flag? I think it should be. Yet, we’re brainwashed into believing there are no other options. This is what kids are supposed to do. They go to school where they’ll learn everything they need to know to function as human adults in our society, right? So what is it they need to know?

Historical facts and dates? They’ll forget those. How the world works? I learned everything I know about physics when I became a second grade teacher because I’d forgotten every little bit of science I learned in school. How to read? When I was a third grader, I sat silently terrified, surrounded by “big kids” in a sixth grade reading class because I had already discovered a way to escape my life in highly engaging chapter books and devoured them voraciously. That’s all I remember about “learning to read” in school—oh, and that I was “smarter” than my classmates because of how quickly I sped through the colors of the SRA reading program. Algebra and geometry? What I learned in my high school algebra class was that I hated math; in geometry, I developed my social skills by convincing the kid behind me to let me cheat off his work so I could avoid my creepy perv of a teacher’s hand on my waste when I went up to his desk to get help.  What do you remember learning in school?

I’ll bet you remember learning how to sit still and raise your hand when you wanted to speak. I’ll bet you remember paying careful attention to the bathroom policy so you’d know how long you’d have to hold it. Or maybe, you remember coming up with clever ways to convince your mom you were sick so you could stay home. I remember thinking if I took the thermometer out of my mouth when my mom was out of the room, the reading would be off enough that she’d have to keep me home—clearly all that science was paying off!

I remember getting antsy when someone else turned a test in ahead of me because it meant I’d lost the race and someone else might be “smarter” than me. I learned that there’s only one right answer and not to ask too many questions. In high school, I learned really well how to fly under the radar, how to be invisible, how to cram for tests the night before so I could get away with ignoring my homework. I learned exactly how little I could do to still graduate, so I guess I learned efficiency?

I also figured out the best time of day to leave campus and walk across town to my boyfriend’s house. (Though there was that one day my dad randomly drove by and I was busted!) I learned that my hair and make-up mattered and that my wardrobe was insufficient. In fact, once when a boy was picking me up for our first date after I had agonized for hours about what I could wear, he looked me up and down and asked if I could change. I learned that the best way to get through high school was to be in the popular crowd, yet I never seemed able to quite break into that. The next best way was to always have a boyfriend, whether I really liked the boy or not.

So what did I really learn? I learned that using my resources was cheating, my worth was determined by how well my teachers liked me, needing others was bad, my thoughts and feelings held no weight, attractive people did better in life than nice people, that my gut was not to be trusted. I learned to please the adults who were always right and that authority figures had total control over my life.

I learned that anything I studied could be forgotten after the test, mistakes were punished and there were no do-overs, failing was to be avoided at all costs. I learned to study my teachers so I knew exactly what they wanted and just how little I could do to keep their favor or at least not attract their contempt.

And I learned what freedom means. It means giving up control over the majority of your time so you can have the freedom to buy a house and toys. It means busting your ass to build someone else’s dream so one day when you are old, you can stop working and be free to finally figure out what your dream is. It means sacrificing your childhood and your sense of self so you can appreciate living in a free country where you get to watch other people live their lives on reality TV.

There’s a powerful reason that five year old girl screams when she’s dragged into that classroom. Children know what true freedom is…and what it isn’t. Alarm bells are ringing in her head and heart; she recognizes that environment has no real interest in who she is and its sole purpose is to suck away her one and only childhood and educate her how to be in this free world of ours.   

First Post

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I left the classroom, after teaching second grade for 6 years, in 2014. I left because of atrocious leadership—like seriously abusive to an unbelievable extent. I would sit in the faculty meetings in shock but also a little entertained. Remember the staff meetings from The Office where Michael was completely inappropriate? Yeah, like that, though sometimes our ED would target a specific teacher and lay into them, red-faced, raised voice, and shaming—those times were less amusing. Once I’d done all I could to try to shift the culture of the school—to no avail—I left with somewhat of a lame plan, knowing I could no longer tolerate the toxic environment.

Here’s the deal: I couldn’t be more grateful for that guy. Had he not been a tyrant, I think I would have spent many more years forcing myself into a painful box that was breaking me. Though I couldn’t have explained it at the time, it was breaking me because I was breaking them—the kids I mean. There was a nagging feeling that things shouldn’t be so hard. And as far as school teachers go, I was a darn good one. Parents of my former students still stop me at the grocery store or when I’m out and about to tell me that they miss me as their child’s teacher. But here’s the deal; when 7 year-old children enter second grade believing that learning sucks, we’re doing something terribly wrong.  

It’s not the teachers’ faults for the most part. Many manage to confer lots of relevant and useful learning to their students which is a miracle based on the system we’ve created where most of what kids are learning is how to be a questionable human. As a recovering school teacher who has spent lots of time researching and thinking about this topic, not only have I come to the conclusion that school is the root of most of our social problems, but it’s also at the heart of our health crisis.

This is Post One of a 60-day blogging challenge. There are really no rules to the challenge except to publish something every day. I plan to mostly get my thoughts on this topic out of my head, but there may be an occasional unrelated post. (Though I’m not even sure that’s possible. My kids tease me that I can bring everything that’s wrong with the world back to school. It’s true—and it’s easier than Kevin Bacon to get there in 6 degrees of separation or less.) My current plan for tomorrow is to present an outline of the ways that school is crippling children and I will follow that with posts that go into more detail about each of the listed ways.

Yes, I know that this is a provocative topic. I’ve tried to temper my disdain and find more positive ways to share my ideas, but this is where I obsess so it’s the easiest content for me to produce. There are existing solutions to our current schooling problems, but they’re, of course, out the box and most parents won’t consider them because we’ve been so effectively schooled ourselves.  Still, I feel compelled to share in the hopes of inspiring action toward a better way.