What I don't like about school

I've had several school-related topics on my to-blog list for a long time. I just kept putting them off because I tend to haul out my soapbox over this stuff. And I know that when I do that, I don't articulate sensibly. Delay again.

But then yesterday, my local writing group buddy Pamela wrote about a few of her family's tough-but-right education decisions--and her reasoning really resonated. So I think I'll take Pam's cue and get my ideas together now. You know I'm long-winded. It'll take me three parts over three days to get it all in. On the bright side, though, I guess that will mean each one will stop at a reasonable length! The plan:

Part 1:What I don't like about school

Part 2: What I like a whole lot about our local school

Part 3: Home: the foundation and the buffer

What I don't like about school

1) unforgiving schedules
It worked very well for routine-driven Boy 1. I think Girlie probably will do fine, too. But I'm not convinced all-day kindergarten is the best plan for every kid. I guess we'll just wait and see how well the much more abstract-thinking Boy 2 takes to having his every moment scheduled in another year.

But for now, my gripe with the daily schedule is mostly logistics. Boy 1's school day starts at 9:15. Girlie's starts at 9:00. Boy 1's ends at 4:00. Girlie's ends at noon.

Get in the car. Get out of the car. Get in the car again. Get out of the car again....

2) fundraisers
By the end of Week 2 this year, between the 2 schools, I had been smacked by no fewer than 5 different fundraisers.

I hate catalogs full of overpriced junk.

I hate the hype they use to get the kids to participate.

I hate that all the money, time, and effort spent on the hoopla results in only a fraction retained by the school.

I passionately hate the newest school fundraiser tactic: No risky door-to-door sales! You don't have to ask anyone to buy at all!! You only have to give us their name and address, and we'll put them on our direct mailing list instead!!!

This year, I hate in particular that for Boy 1's school, we've never been told exactly what we're raising funds for. It's just WHAM! Money, please!

The whole business gets my blood pressure up, so I bowed out (I hope) gracefully just as I did last year: wrote a letter to the school saying we declined to participate, and gave a $50 donation instead.

I don't know for sure what fund I donated to, but at least I can say honestly that I did not sell out my family and friends to some marketing company.

3) testing
I swear I'm not going to go off on the SOL tests. (Ah, about that acronym. For the out-of-staters among you, in Virginia, SOL actually stands for Standards of Learning. NOT the other acronym that when cleaned up translates to "luckless and hopeless"!) I don't object to the SOLs themselves, and to a certain degree I don't object to the tests. Measurement is good. What bugs me is that we've allowed testing to overshadow the larger philosophy.

A former teaching colleague summed it up well: Weigh the pig. Weigh the pig. Weigh the pig.

But when it's time to line up at the scale, everyone forgets to FEED the pig. They just keep putting it back onto the scale and wondering why it hasn't gained.

My little pig and his classmates lost a huge chunk of the last entire quarter of school last year in deference to testing. There's the required testing. There's also an assortment of testing that applies only to the grades who do not take the required tests. All this testing has to be proctored, and the specials teachers were assigned that duty. So, once all these rounds of testing began, there was no more library, art, computer lab, or music. PE was out, too, because the laptops used for testing were set up in the gym.

My pig won't get weighed for the first time (on the state scale, anyway) until 3rd grade. Two years away...but because older piggies must be weighed during those in-between years, he and his fellow pigs will likely not be fed those last few weeks again this year.

I will say that I thought Boy 1's teacher last year was terrific. She managed to find ways to keep the class engaged despite all the restrictions, and she filled in the blanks left by the missing specials a whole lot better than I could have done in her shoes.

But still. Why should this be necessary? What's wrong with this picture?

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Well, I see that starting near midnight and taking a shower between draft and edit have pushed me waaay past the deadline for this Oct. 9 post. But I will not concede! I hereby declare my Blogtober 2013 NOT to be a failure! At least, not yet!