School

I have become obsessed with schools for one simple reason: I want my 8-year old daughter to attend one. And I want the school she attends to do her more good than harm.

My husband and I both grew up attending our neighborhood public school – his in the Chicago area and mine in the Los Angeles County school district. So, when Eliza was a baby, we assumed that she would eventually go to a neighborhood school just like we had. But, when Eliza was little, she was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy. Since she was tiny, wore leg braces, and needed some extra physical support, we decided that we would put her in private school, rather than our neighborhood school which is large, crowded and underfunded. And so we researched our best options, applied, and sent her off.

Then, the calls from the school started and I began my education on education.

At first, when Eliza had troubles in school, which was often, we would be called in to talk with the teachers. At these meetings, the teachers or program heads would recount the most recent litany of horrors set into motion by my child: she refused to come in from recess, she didn’t complete her assigned coloring project, she had a tantrum when she was asked to line up with the other kids, she threw her book across the room, she chewed the erasers off all the pencils. After allowing enough time for shame and guilt to settle in, the teachers would look at me earnestly and remind me, “you know, we really expect kids to be independent learners.”

For years, I must have looked back at them with a befuddled expression. Eliza taught herself to read by the age of three. In school, she would routinely find whatever part of the room had the glue gun and settle in for the day. She would happily just mess about and not have anything to do with the teacher or the other kids. She didn’t care what the other kids in class were doing. In pre-school, she sat and memorized a French dictionary. She never made a fuss about being left at school. How much more independent could she be, I wondered? Were other kindergarteners so much more independent? Did they make their own lunches, drive themselves to school, hold down part-time jobs?

In the United States, it is good to raise an “independent learner” and bad to raise what would presumably be called a “dependent learner.” Indeed, in a nation that values rugged individualism, boot-strapping and a frontier mentality, my failure to raise an “independent learner” felt almost un-American.

Pop Quiz:
Which of the following illustrates an “independent learner?” (choose student A or student B)

(a) Student A is with a group of students all of whom are sitting at a table. Student A is doing the same worksheet on counting by twos in the same way that has been demonstrated by the teacher and is being done by every other child at Student A’s table.

(b) Student B is sitting in the corner reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid, completely ignoring the other students who are sitting at the table doing worksheets on counting by twos. Occasionally, Student B will get up, wander past the table where the students are working and say “Whatcha doing? The answer is 8” and then head over to the glue gun.

Answer: Student A, who is conforming to the group and doing what all the other students are doing is the independent learner.

I now know that “independent learner,” when spoken by education professionals does not refer to students who learn independently. Instead, “independent learner” translates roughly to “does not require the teacher’s attention.” Embarrassed and defensive, I would ask what the teachers were there for, if not to pay attention to each student? The answer was always the same: “the teacher is there for the entire class.” In other words, “your kid is hogging up too much of the teacher’s time.”

When not being called to the school to address Eliza’s failure to develop independently, we would be called in to discuss her disinclination to “transition.”

I am told that, typically, a child either handles transitions well or doesn’t handle transitions well. Most problematic is the child who is unpredictable in how she handles transitions, sometimes doing well and other times not. Eliza is of this ilk.

All day long, a first grader is told what she will do, when she will do it and for how long she will continue to do it. If it is time to do math, it doesn’t matter if she is in the middle of the very best chapter of Captain Underpants she has ever read. She has to stop and move on to math. She has to continue to do math until she is told to stop doing math. She has to line up with her classmates and pee because it is 10:20am. If she gets distracted and fails to eat her sandwich during the 20 minute lunch period, she does not get to eat lunch because lunch is over.

A “good transitioner” follows the schedule, without complaint and without regard for his or her own interests, desires, or needs. A “bad transitioner” insists that his own interests should carry some weight in what he is doing and lets you know his or her thoughts about the change in plans.

What would this be like for adults?

Let’s say it is Super Bowl Sunday, you are watching TV and you are 25 minutes into the game. It’s a great game. Your neighbor walks into the room, switches off the television and announces that it is time for you to scrub her toilet. If you yell, “Get the hell away from the television,” and turn the game back on, you have not transitioned well. If, on the other hand, you get up and say in a pleasant voice, “I’ve so been looking forward to scrubbing the toilet” and head off to the bathroom, you have transitioned well. In just a few minutes, while you are in the middle of scrubbing, a bell will ring. That bell will tell you that it is time for you to sit down and draw seven-digit numbers from a random digit table. If you drag your feet, try to get back to the TV, or insist on having your wife explain why it is that she needs you to compile a list of random seven-digit numbers, you are, unfortunately, again failing to transition well. On the other hand, if you gently set your toilet brush down, pick up your random digit table and ask, “would you prefer your random numbers be written in pencil or pen?” you have transitioned well. If you feel that you have drawn a sufficient list of random seven-digit numbers and wander away from this task in order to get yourself a snack because you are hungry, you are being distractible and failing to transition.

Eventually, Eliza was expelled from school in the first grade. I was shocked – who expels a six-year old from school? But national statistics tell us that very young children are being expelled from schools more frequently and at earlier and earlier grades. It is no longer unusual for a child to be expelled from preschool in the United States. These children are 4, 5 and 6 years old and they attend public as well as private schools.

As parents, as citizens of a democratic society, we should be outraged. But we are not. We assume that schools know what they are talking about and that something must be wrong with our children. We feel ashamed, take our children home, and wonder how we will ever get our child into another school.

But the truth is that something is seriously wrong with our schools. We are pretending to prepare children for the 21st Century by educating them in 19th Century schools. It is time to reinvent schooling so that it fits the needs and interests of our children, rather than the needs and interests of bureaucracies. Children are not standardized. Maybe schooling shouldn’t be either.