The Cure for All Educational Woes

As I have been reading other people’s blogs, I have noticed that inviting a guest author to appear on another blog, to quote my daughters, is a thing. Not wanting to be left without a guest author on my blog, I have searched for one, and finally found someone willing to do a guest post.

Middlest, also known as Hannah, just finished her Advanced Placement Test for English Composition and her instructor assigned her to write a satirical essay. When she finished, she had Eldest, Kaleigh, who is an English Major, proof read it; which she did. Then she read it out loud to the entire family. In between belly-aching laughs and wiping tears from our eyes, I knew I had found my guest author. Even better, she couldn’t say ‘no’. Well, she could have, but I am her father.

Here is what she wrote:

Countless people have tried, and tried again, to find the solution to all education woes. I mean, let’s face it, you can walk into any high school around the country, and you’ll see the same problems and the same bleary-eyed, sleep-deprived, over-stressed, slightly-depressed teenagers. All high schools are, in essence, exactly the same, and in every one of these high schools, lurks every Education Administrator’s worst nightmare: students who are failing. These nightmares tarnish the reputation of Education Administrators around the world, and so they work feverishly, night and day, in their offices, far removed from an actual school environment, in an attempt to make sure that these nightmares cease to exist.

And they think they’ve found the solution. They’ve proposed a new schedule, in which classes will be longer, and everyday certain periods will rotate out, so that each student can take more classes. The new schedule even has a solution for all the students who are going to be stressed out over their increased course load: every student is required to have a lunch. It’s mandatory free time. It’s actually quite brilliant when you think about it. In fact, when asked if they approved of the new schedule, 100% of those asked agreed. It should be noted that students, teachers, and parents were not included in this survey; they were not even consulted, but those Education Administrators, with all of their doctorates and superior knowledge, would know better than the lowly students, many of whom are failing anyway, and as such, their ability to form logical and coherent opinions is in question. So, it’s good they did not consult students and teachers who have to use the schedule every day, as they may not be well learned in the workings of student’s minds and learning patterns.

The only way to make sure that the under-educated children, who are falling behind in classes catch up, is to give them more time in class per day and give them more classes per day. This way, they can spend even more time learning in an environment that’s moving far too quickly. If you didn’t understand 45 minutes worth of trigonometry, then you are definitely going to understand 60 minutes worth of it. It’s brilliant. Give them more class time, so that when they don’t understand something, the teacher can continue teaching; the class rotates out tomorrow anyway, so students don’t even have class. By the time they come back in two days, they will have forgotten all about whatever it was that was confusing them. You can’t beat that logic.

However, if classes are longer, and there are more classes, but the school day is not getting any longer, then where is all of this extra time coming from? Well, there are going to be 11 less days of class instruction than there were with the previous schedule, and I can’t think of anything more beneficial to the students. Students will now be forced to learn this material in the comfort of their own home, at their own pace. Students can move through it as slowly, or as quickly, as they like.  Some may choose to not move through it at all. They won’t know it for the final, and they may even fail the final, but they’ll be fine, because at least they all got to have a lunch period every day.  Also, having fewer class days will eliminate stress, because students have less material to cover in class. Instead, they will be learning about it at home, without a teacher’s help, and they will learn it mere days before a final exam, so it will still be fresh in their minds when they sit for the test. Really, we should just get rid of all teachers and their distracting explanations, and just cram the entire year into one night of studying before an exam.

This new schedule will vastly improve the quality of our nation’s nightmares. Children will have an increased workload and more class time per day, but less class time overall, so they don’t get too stressed out about their new workload. This new schedule, although it may sound confusing, will actually eliminate the number of students who are confused by giving them more time to think through the problems by themselves on days when they do not have class. It will also ensure that students have less instruction time, so that they can work at their own pace, at home, free from the distractions of teachers.  But most importantly of all, every child will have a lunch period.  
 

Senior Pranks, the dull and unimaginative.

I wrote last week about the end drawing nigh. By which of course, I meant the end of the school year, not the end of the world. Apparently, however, some High School students interpret the end of the school year as a coming apocalypse and determine that their behavior should be adjusted accordingly. It is as if they are living out the answer to that age old rhetorical question, “What would you do if you knew you only had a few (minutes, hours, days...) left to live?”

The answer to that question for many young people across the country is random acts of vandalism. Spray painting buildings, breaking windows, randomly destroying bathrooms and plumbing fixtures. All of these actions are flippantly cloaked in the definition, “Senior Prank.”


I have read with great interest during the past week what some high school seniors consider a senior prank. I am delighted to inform you that our educational system is a success. For thirteen years youngsters across the nation are herded into classrooms, force-fed information, taught to take tests, and taught to think independently. But, mind you, just think independently; do not act independently. As Eldest recently observed, “You see, High School has tried to make me fit in this 8″ by 8″ box. After a while, my edges were sanded away, everything that people considered “different” was removed, it’s as if a big chunk of me is missing.” (http://alltherestisunwritten.wordpress.com/2012/06/03/faith/)

High schools reward conformity, compliance to norms, and blindly accepting the rules. This, with the exception of rule following, shows in the unimaginative senior pranks making the news. Three local teens were arrested for destroying property in one suburban high school and perhaps the most notable, was the defacing of the School of the Arts with graffiti. In this case almost thirty seniors were arrested for that prank. Even worse, one piece of graffiti was a stick figure. One Facebook friend observed that whoever drew that should not even graduate. This was after all The School for the ARTS.

Entering this horrible state of senior prank affairs are a fine group of seniors from Ravena-Coeymans-Selkirk High School, located just south of Albany, NY. These imaginative seniors plastered the inside of their school with 5000 packs of Post-it-notes. (http://www.timesunion.com/local/article/RCS-seniors-suspended-over-Post-It-prank-3620154.php)They used different colors to write words such as “Seniors” and (forgive my french) “poop”! These 29 students, including the valedictorian and salutatorian, were let into the school by janitors, who even assisted the students in the prank.

When one of the janitors became nervous and called the students early the next morning, they returned to the school and cleaned it up.

I say KUDOS! to the RCSHS seniors for being both imaginative and responsible with their senior prank. The adults of the school were not happy that their students stepped out of the box, and they therefore suspended the 29 seniors.  Superintendent Elisabeth Smith is quoted as saying, “As adults in this learning community, we are not willing to sacrifice the health and safety of our students...” Yes folks, apparently all you have seen in horror movies is true. Schools are havens of evil beings after 7 p.m. Smith continued to say, “we will not tolerate the the loss of valuable planning or instructional time.” I, for one, am not fooled by that. We all know that the last week or two of school is completely bereft of an instruction or planning. Besides, these young citizens cleaned up the notes themselves, simply at the request of one nervous janitor. Congratulations adults of the learning community for once again crushing the imagination and precociousness of our young men and women.

Of course, the students are left with no recourse to pursue. It is, after all, their last few weeks of school. I wonder, however, what would happen if they boycotted some event the “Adults” in the learning community had planned. Perhaps some event where teachers, administrators, parents gather together to parade their handiwork before a large gathered assembly of other adults. Something so grand that tickets have to be rationed out to insure that the crowd is not too large.  An event where each student is dressed just like the one on either side of him or her. Where, when their name is called, they walk across a stage and receive an empty token of their years in the educational mill, while adults clap for the fine job they have done in chiseling these people to be so successful and being so alike and docile.

What if there were no valedictorian or salutatorian speech? What if 29 of their number were absent? What then?

The end is near! Curious?

The end is near. No, not the end of the world, but the end of the school year, and what a year it has been.  Eldest is graduating this month and this past year has been a busy one for her. She decided to skip lunch periods in favor of filling her schedule with classes. Of the eight classes she took, seven were Advanced Placement (AP). She capped off a week filled with AP tests with my sister’s wedding, where she was the pianist, and her last piano recital of her High School career, where she played a concert version of chopsticks that had major classical themes woven throughout. The piece was fun, yet technically challenging. She also is involved in a Bible Quizzing program through church that is quite competitive (http://rdistaffen.blogspot.com/2011/07/what-exactly-is-bible-quizzing.html). This past weekend was the final tournament for the local area, and at the end of the month is the National tournament at Seattle Pacific University in Seattle, WA.

I say all this, not only to brag, but also to point out that my daughter has elected to take on this heavy load. My wife and I did not force her to take this heavy load. She wanted to. We thought she was taking on too much and counseled her against it, but she did it anyway, because she was curious and wanted to learn.

The actions of my daughter illustrate that people are naturally curious; they want to explore and to learn and to grow. This natural desire to learn is evidenced in everything from the two year old who constantly asks, “Why?” to the popularity of the Google search engine. Google did not become the default search engine for so many people because of slick marketing and sweepstake contests. Google has grown because it met the basic need of curious people everywhere to answer the questions, who, what, where, when, why and how.

A few weeks ago Littlest came home from school a grumpy. She, along with thousands of other 8^th grade students across New York State, were in the midst of taking standardized tests. The same test with the infamous talking pineapple, which challenges a hare to a race, loses, and gets eaten by the other animals. These tests are administered to gauge how well teachers are teaching. Consequently, teachers spend valuable classroom time teaching students to take the test.

Littlest summed it up this way, “School is so boring. All we do is prepare to take tests. Like who is going to hire me to take tests? That is just what I want to be when I grow up, a professional test taker. And what is up with the talking pineapple? I mean the story was funny, but it was dumb!”

The Sudbury Model of Education is the exact polar opposite of the way we assume education should be done (http://sudburyschool.com/articles/sudbury-model-education). It supports young people's curiousity by allowng their own interests and thirst for knowledge to guide the learning process. 

Exploring, asking questions, and solving problems are how we learn and grow. Standardized mandatory tests did not inspire Edison to invent the light bulb, the Wright brothers to invent the airplane, Chester Carlson to invent the copier, or the French to invent the french fry.

Perhaps someday the pineapples who mandate layer upon layer of bureaucratic testing for children will realize they have lost the race and promptly be eaten by an angry horde of 8^th graders.

Until then, congratulations to all who are finishing up another year of education, and to those who are celebrating graduation and moving on to something new. Stay curious my friend, stay curious.

The end.