It’s 6:49 a.m. and with what can only be described as a grumble, my daughter Meg says goodbye as she heads out the front door.
6:49 a.m.
The morning bell rings at 7:10 a.m.
21 minutes for her to drive to school, park, go to her locker and be in her home room seat.
Good thing we live close or she’d be leaving even earlier like many of her classmates.
Her day will be composed of seven class periods. AP Biology (double period), AP English, AP Calculus, AP Government and Economics, French 3 and Art 2.
Between each class she will have four minutes to go to her locker and make it to her next class before the bell rings. Her school is two stories. She has told me, “Don’t even think about trying to go to the bathroom during that time. It’s impossible. So I don’t drink during the day.”
At 11:02 she will have lunch. Her lunch will last 24 minutes.
Then back to her 5th period class, followed by two more four-minute commutes to get to two more 53 minutes classes. The dismissal bell rings at 2:20 p.m.
This is her day.
And she hates it.
And I have to say…
Is it any wonder?
* * *
Meg’s school is consistently ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the Top 25 public high schools in the country, and to this the superintendent said, “Student achievement is our top priority. We have increased our Advanced Placement offerings, and put programs and tools in place that help students achieve. This recognition shows that our students can successfully compete against anyone in the country.”
Student achievement is a really good thing. It is.
And being able to “successfully compete with anyone in the country” is a good thing I guess.
But does student achievement in school have to come at the cost of the student hating school?
Because, like I said, my daughter hates school.
She loves learning, but hates school.
She hates her day at school. She hates the relentlessness of it. She hates that she feels like she is being crammed with material presented with no reflection, no pause, and that the students are often told they have to keep going, they have to get through all the material, because they have to be ready for the exam.
Because, you see, in the world in which Meg lives, the exam is everything. The exam will become the number that defines the achievement, that will highly rank the school, which will say all is well.
But is it all well?
That’s the question I was asking today as I watched my daughter begrudgingly head off to school.
And what is achievement anyway?
And is there a correlation between achievement and learning?
Are they the same, or are they two very distinct entities?
And since we like numbers so much, have we ever measured the cost of achievement? Because I would say, the cost is high. Probably higher than it has to be and when I say cost, I am not talking dollars.
No. I am talking about the cost of our young people’s desire to learn being extinguished instead of ignited.
I am talking about the struggle we have to keep our child curious, inquisitive and creative in a system that doesn’t seem to reward, much less desire, such traits because after all, how do you measure inquisitiveness and creativity?
Are we teaching that learning isn’t as important as achieving?
Meg feels like we are. She feels she is seen as only as numbers.
She’s right.
I think we strive for achievement because we can measure it. We can quantify numbers. We can put them in these little man-made orders we like so much. We can stack numbers against other numbers and then make judgments on those numbers. We deem some numbers as “good” and then systems can praise themselves when good numbers are achieved. And in the case of our school system, student grades are changed to better grades, when good numbers aren’t achieved.
But we forget that these numbers aren’t just numbers happening in isolation. These numbers are attached to people, to kids, and these kids are painfully aware they’re being judged and ranked based on these numbers.
GPA, class rank, ACT, SAT, AP scores. The list is long.
They are told these numbers may add up to, or subtract from their future success.
Is it any wonder there is so much stress and so much cheating? Is it any wonder that as a parent proctor for AP exams I was not allowed to bring my laptop to the exam because some PARENTS in some schools were using them to help kids cheat during the exams!
Really?
Is this what education has come to?
Is this achievement? Is this learning?
I must say though, Meg has learned her lessons well. She now uses numbers just like she has been taught. For there is one number she was holding onto this morning as she walked out the door at 6:49 a.m….
91
That’s how many school days until she graduates and will never, ever have to set foot in her high school again.
The above photo is just a small part of Meg’s library. She loves books. She has over 400 of them. She spent part of her Christmas vacation organizing them by color. She almost always has one in her hand. She loves reading because she loves the stimulation of learning.
Great post and of course so very true and so very sad. I remember hating school, only when I started my first degree I started loving learning. Too bad it has to be this way.
It is too bad and it ignore so many facts about children and how to learn. That said, it will be interesting to watch what happens to education with so many budding industries like Khan Academy. The traditional education might have to be forced to change their ways. Time will tell. Thanks for stopping by and for your comment. Both are appreciated.
She and my son must go to the same school. Only Jon is out of her at 6:25. He’s fast, but not fast enough to eat lunch or breakfast at school. Not fast enough to go to the bathroom. He loves to swim and has pool every day and that keeps him going. I cyberschool Charlie, because our public school sucks at educating kids with autism, but Jon opted for traditional school. I hate waking him up, I know he’s the walking dead until at least nine and that’s third period. He’s missed algebra, english and biology trying to wake up.
My point is, I asked the principal and superintendent why we start so early. What does it boil down to? Sports.
The school can’t compete if the kids are not out of there by 2:30 at the latest. Sports is why my son is sleep deprived to the point where I am afraid for his mental state. And he’s a freshman, three and a half more years of this crap.
I didn’t even think about sports, but yes, I can easily see that. I thought it was busing and being able to use the busses for staggered start times. Meg takes Melatonin to help her fall asleep each night by 10-11 because she says she can’t naturally fall asleep that early, but even then it’s a struggle to wake up at 6:15. My son, like yours also slept through the first few periods when he was in school. During an IEP meeting his senior year his physics teacher, who had the misfortune of having him 1st and 2nd period was frustrated that he slept through class. I will never forget her looking at me and saying, “What can you do about it?” Like I could change his sleep pattern! I told her we had tried countless things to try to get him to sleep but he was impervious to them all and we were completely out of ideas. I said to her I simply did not know how to make another person fall asleep. Had I the presence of mind I wished I had said, “What are you going to do about school starting so bloody early?” Like Meg, I am grateful for 91 days (now 90). Keep telling yourself, “This too shall pass.” Best of luck to you all!
Wow- and this is from your daughter who, it seems, is successful in school (she is taking ap classes). Imagine kids that don’t do well academically.
You make a good point. Honestly, I can’t even imagine. In our school system, outside the magnet program Meg is in, every single high school is struggling. They aren’t achieving the test scores they are supposed to, so what has happened, investigators found the administrators changed grades to improve their overall status. So what happens to the student? It seems it doesn’t matter. How did it get to this?
really!- that’s crazy. Sounds like schools are in the business of serving themselves not the students.
“Sounds like schools are in the business of serving themselves not the students.” Well said. So often I have had the very same thought. It seems like the institutions that exist to support children really exist to support (literally) adults.
I have this dream that a whole school full of kids will, one day, drop their books on the floor and walk out, en masse. Of course, it will never happen.
I like your dream and it would be very interesting to see that and the response from adults. In the first draft of my post I wrote about how adults united to prevent unfavorable conditions. Apparently the teachers think the conditions are unfavorable because they were able to negotiate a 53 minute planning period each day, the kids don’t get such a break. What’s the difference? How I see it, the difference is the teachers have the power to exert their will and kids don’t. Thanks for stopping by and sharing your thoughts.
Aww, I think this may just be an age-old problem. I didn’t like HS either, and I remember counting the days as well. Thankfully for her, the number of days to the end, is well within sight. I hope she will be encouraged by this.
And I love her bookcase! I visited my niece in Oct., she also loves books, and is in the beginning stages of getting her first book published, her bookcase was also sorted by color! It’s such a great look! Oh, and she always has a book or two in hand as well!
Meg will be fine, that I know, and you are absolutely right and I too was so glad to leave high school behind, but what I wonder is, has it gotten worse? Or was I just completely clueless when I graduated in 1983? I don’t remember the emphasis on tests, the discussion of numbers, the counting of scholarship dollars and then announcing each individual student’s dollar amount in school wide assemblies. It just seems to be crammed down their throat so openly. I guess I just have this fantasy of education being a stimulating experience for kids, this cool place they enjoy going to, a place that is geared to them and their needs, to their teenage sleep cycle. Fortunately Meg does have her books and her room is her sanctuary, a place where she can surround herself with what she loves and I will gladly pass along to her your compliment.
I know I am a dreamer, but it helps to write about the stuff that fills my mind, to call it out and to have discussions such as this. Thanks for participating. I appreciate it, deeply.
When I was in high school, we asked the teachers “Why do we have to be here for Junior and Senior year? The tests don’t change and you only have to pass it as a Sophomore to graduate high school.” We were told funding. My graduating class wasn’t authorized winter graduations because the school funding was based on students in the seats for the month of April. They would have lost funding if we had graduated once we had the class and credit requirements met. It’s insane. My daughter is six and in the second grade. Next year we are homeschooling her because the school refuses to acknowledge her autistic traits, and in response, they wont provide her with much needed services and when I had her tested for gifted (as a hail mary pass) she qualified academically but not creatively. She’s autistic, how creative were they expecting her to be? She wasn’t granted entrance into the gifted program though because her initial IEP team put her in kindergarten a year early (at the age of four) because she needed the structure and services they could provide for her that were lacking in the pre-k curriculum. Her current school viewed that initial placement as an “academic intervention” and thus say that the gifted program can’t help her. It’s a nightmare. I’m teaching her at home and she’s thriving, she’s learning multiplication with me and learning to add two digit numbers at school. I had to show her how to subtract with borrowing because her teacher assigns homework without explaining it. This is how second grade is? Really? And in third grade, she would be responsible for changing classes for different subjects and keeping track (and dragging around) multiple textbooks? When did third grade start resembling freshmen year? And that is too much for a newly seven year old with autism. She’s excited to be homeschooled next year. She’s already asked me several times this school year “Mommy, can you be my teacher today?” This is a child who has had a book in her hand since she could hold one. She could recite “Green eggs and ham” from memory before she could ask for a glass of milk. She loves learning, but doesn’t want to go to school? That is a problem.
I remember your story clearly from when we first met in early December. It is a haunting story. I am so glad you have the option to homeschool your daughter and it sounds like it will be the ideal situation for both of you. The school system you are in sounds beyond terrible and frightfully ignorant of the law. Having dealt with ignorant teachers, as well as extremely gifted teachers, I know how incredibly exhausting the ignorant ones are. They can quite literally drain the life out of you. Parents shouldn’t have to face getting the life drained out of them trying to educate their children. And children shouldn’t get the life drained out of them attending school. As creative as we can, surely we will begin to examine further alternative avenues of education. Best of luck next year!
Thank you. I know what you mean. She’s had four teachers at three different schools (thank the Army for that one). Her kindergarten teacher in California was WONDERFUL! I loved her to pieces. The one she had in Virginia was horrible. She never brought home homework and when she did it was remedial preschool work (ie. Connect the dots that had eight points). Her first grade teacher here in Tennessee was fabulous. I still talk to her and we’ve shared a lot of information about so much. Her son is the same age as mine, so she’s always asking questions about boys while I’m venting my frustrations about my daughter’s second grade teacher. I really think, once we get into the swing of things, she will do so much better and be able to be herself more with homeschooling. I’m so glad we have this option because I don’t know what I’d do if I had to keep her in public school any longer. I just don’t have the energy and having Asperger’s myself, I don’t understand the laws very well and I don’t know how to force the school to help her. I do know how to relate to her and how to help her succeed and I think that’s more than I can say for the school system right now. I’m sure I’ll be blogging away at it come summer and fall.
I think you will do well together. You have so much curriculum flexibility she will be able to flourish under such circumstances. I know when I homeschooled my son for the second half of 1st grade we finished 1st grade and all of 2nd in just 4 months and when I returned him to school in the fall he reentered as a 3rd grader. There are so many possibilities nowadays with online programs and such, you could have great fun and learn so much. Keep us posted!
I’m so sad to hear your story. We just took my son out of public school last year to attend a Waldorf school. It’s gone incredibly well for him. His teacher has to remind him that the only progress that matters is his own and not to compare himself to others. All we heard year after year in public school was how badly he was going to fall behind if he didn’t keep up with his classmates which, of course, taught him nothing. I wish you all the best with homeschooling. My theory is that about a third of kids tolerate public school – the rest are damaged by it. Yep, damaged by an institution designed to educate them. Why are we even tolerating this?
Your thoughts mirror mine. I have worked in the schools and see it first-hand. I also have many friends who are teachers and they agree also. They are frustrated by all the testing and they don’t even feel like they actually teach most of the time. There is no creativity left in the current education system, at least in most places, and that leads to no creativity left in the students. Where does that leave our world?
You ask a very important question… where does it leave us. It seems in education we have a clear means-ends inversion which has lead to teach the test to increase performance because everything is tied to performance. Good performance helps the administration but it seems to leave a lot of poorly served children behind. Which leads me to think although I haven’t researched this but it seems No Child Left Behind has codified this. Makes for an ironic policy title, sadly. One day while I was walking door the hall of Meg’s school I heard the teacher say to the class, “We don’t have time to discuss that. We have to keep moving to get to the end of the section.” I stood there and shook my head and a little part of my heart broke. They don’t have time to discuss. They don’t have time to satisfy a student’s curiosity. The teacher felt so pressed to move on she had to ignore her student’s request. And I didn’t believe this comment to be the fault of the teacher, it is important I say that, I truly felt the fault for such a comment falls squarely on it is the pressure applied to the teacher by the system as you have said you have seen. Thank you for your important insights. I am glad you contributed to the discussion.
Some times in life, we need to actually “slow down” in order to “speed up”.
Take the time to move forward.
I suspect that is something that Meg would love to do.
Absolutely. It is my sincerest hope that when the dust settles on this whole college application process that she finds herself at a university that fits her desire to interact in a much more intimate level with the material. She craves engagement, she loves discussion and looking beyond the obvious and what’s presented in the text which is often pretty superficial. She wants to dig deep. And she wants interactions with instructors who are leaders in both knowledge AND inspiration. Oh I will be so happy if she gets to know that experience! Thanks for stopping by and for joining our discussion!
Wow. Some great points here. I, of course, have lots to say about education, and I’ve been gearing up for some posts on Chinese education, myself. I’ve taught college/uni in Canada, the US and China, and had the terrifying, depressing, but unique experience of teaching high school in China. That last experience came close to destroying part of my soul.
I think I could easily launch into something entirely too long for a post comment, but I will say a) I think you ask some extremely valid questions about what learning and achievement actually mean (quantity, quality, and let me add validity to the mix), and b) be very glad your daughter isn’t a high school student in China
I made myself a cup of coffee and started reading through your “education” category. Made it back to December 7th, 2011′s post (the poll). Oh, my, deep sigh, I can’t let much more time go by, must write about education. Must. Need to block off, oh, a month from my calendar! I will make it to your China posts as you have majorly piqued my curiosity, but sadly, the coffee is gone and my to do list awaits. There will be more. Indeed, there will be time for you and time for me, and time for yet a hundred indecisions, and for a hundred visions and revisions, before the taking of toast and tea. (just had to work in a wee bit of T.S. Eliot there!)
Ia that her bookshelf? looks organized to me with lots of good reads. no?
Point I’m trying to make is that the schools do what they do (teach to tests) and then we encourage our kids to do more… like what Meg does… read her books and broaden her mind. Sure there are problems….
It’s a sticky wicket and I know there is a no one-size-fits-all solution, and in this post I did what I least like doing and that’s present the problems but offer no solutions. That said, I think it’s sad that school becomes something one must endure. We endure getting a cavity filled but should not endure years of our lives. I think school often can be a missed opportunity and I think missed opportunities are sad. I am going to ponder and reflect more and hopefully one day be able to be part of the solution. Let’s turn kids on! Hey, and while we’re at it let’s turned adults on too! Thanks for your comments and for being part of what I think is an important discussion!
I concur… I too would love to be part of the solution. TY!
Yes! She did a good job with it didn’t she. Actually her shelves wrap around 3 walls in her room. She wanted to be surrounded by her books!
Our school district went to trimesters halfway through Will’s high school education. This allows them to teach two more courses per year, but they only have five classes a day, and the classes are longer with reasonable breaks in between. They have home rooms. Both Will and Patty (the younger non-autistic daughter) went to our neighborhood school. Our school district (I say “our school” even though my kids graduated three years ago) is in a poor neighborhood; 80% of the students qualify for free or reduced lunches. Literacy is a real issue here. But we have an innovative superintendent who has brought the students up to one of Michigan’s most improved schools. Our schools do not have the money to supply computers to all the students. So our superintendent instituted a policy of encouraging kids to bring to school whatever technology they have. It is amazing that even poor students sometimes have smart phones. Many have tablets. They are going to bring these items anyway, so why ban them? Use them, he says. Our school district is very small (Will graduated with a class of 73), which means that no one gets lost. It also means that they couldn’t “offer” as much as other suburban, wealthy districts. There were no weighted grades until after Will had graduated. Patty took the first AP class our district offered in 2008. Nevertheless, they have been successful in college. I don’t know the answer. Will feels smaller in terms of high schools is better. Mary went to the regional autism program at a giant, high pressured high school. The graduation ceremony was like an assembly line. So fast. Will’s graduation commencement was much more satisfying. Each student was recognized. Turned, faced the crowd with their partner. We had the opportunity to take a picture.
As I reread your comment and how you wrote of the schools not being able to provide the students with computers and I just chuckled a bit as to say our school district is sadly underfunded is an understatement. The school my kids went to, although one of the top performers in the country, barely has one computer in each classroom for the teacher to use. And if the classroom has a computer, no telling its age! Their school is also small, Ted graduated with 91 other kids. Meg’s class is about the same. It’s really a rather wonderful setting in terms of size and the intimacy in which you mention. It’s just the attitude. Meg’s US History teacher used to play a piece of music either at the beginning or end of class, and was told he could no longer use instructional time for that. He had to have the text book open and teach content. And that makes me sad to think an administration is unable to see the cultural lessons in a piece of music and the tie in it can have to history. Moreover, it is disturbing to me that their focus and thinking is as narrow as that and they have an inability to see that a few moments of music not only can instruct but can be valuable in being, oh, just relaxing and entertaining and maybe, just maybe contribute to school being oh, just a little fun! Thanks for your thoughts Ann. They are always appreciated.
Interesting, I would make one suggestion to Meg for what it’s worth. I remember feeling very much on the achievement mill and wondering where it would ever end and why I should care and so I quit. after my sophmore year of college I dropped out of school (much to my parent’s horror) and spent a year working on the southside of Chicago as a community organizer, not to have something on my resume but to spend a little time living the values I held so dear philosophically and to test myself. It was the best thing I ever did when I returned to school I appreciated and understood what I wanted out of it in a way I never felt the room to before. My parents worried I would never return but I finished undergrad and got two masters degrees after that, because I did love learning and I even loved learning the academic way, I just needed a break. I know there are a million right answers out there for everyone, just thought I’d share mine and I hope Meg finds hers.
Thank you. I genuinely appreciate your comment and understand, not to mention share your opinion. I understand the need to make life real, away from an artificial classroom which for a young person has been most of their life. At times Meg has said she wants to abandon the whole college thing for the moment and be a tug boat captain, to which we replied, “Then research what it takes to become a tugboat captain.” I think the most important lesson Teddy has taught me is there is more than one way to okay. The traditional, typical route is not always the the route to be taken. I went straight through undergrad. Being the obedient child I graduated in 4 years just like my parents insisted. But when I graduated I had not a clue what I wanted from life beyond school. I did not know who I was or what I wanted to be, I had simply done what had been expected of me. I applaud both my kids for questioning convention. We have tried to raise them to be independent thinkers and the fact they even acknowledge a way beyond the traditional way means we have done what we set out to do. I understand too the challenge of questioning, it can be frustrating and painful to question and not automatically accept everything. Meg and Ted will be just fine, that I have no doubt, and if it is straight through college for her I know she will do it because that’s how she wanted to do it, not because she felt she had to do it. And Ted, Ted who dropped out of college after freshman year too will find his way. It is my job to be a support as they question the world and their place in it and to help them become the people they are destined to be. Again, thank you for your comment. And by the way, community organizer on the south side, bet you made some influential friends! (p.s. I was born on the south side, Woodlawn Hospital, 60th and Cottage Grove)
aww, a tug boat captain sounds wonderful. I often think I would have been better suited to a job where i am busy physically but my mind is free to wander – I fantasize about delivering the mail, myself. I have no doubt she will find her way and she is lucky to have parents who are well aware of all the beautiful paths life can travel. My partner grew up in one of those elitist, prep school kind of environments where everything about your future is already written in stone and she thrived in it. Not because she has a pretentious bone in her body, but because she loved the structure and rules of it (sound familiar?) so everyone has their path, of course. I do wish things like gap years, etc were presented to kids more often as viable ways to explore though.
o and btw, i was many years behind the most famous community organizer but not so far behind i had any idea who he was when I did the job, and we worked for different groups anyway, but his book on his experiences was fun to read.
Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts. I like the mailman idea as well and for the very same reasons. I also like the gap year. There are some, like your partner, who know where they are going, but there are many others, possibly the majority, who don’t, and year to explore life, the world and learn more about who you are before you make a huge investment in education makes so much sense. Meg would love to do a gap year, and we would support that, and in writing this I must admit I am negligent in not investing that path for her. But it’s like the momentum onto college is this crazy, powerful force that ignores all other possibilities. I have learned this year I don’t like that. I don’t like this thinking and how we ignore vast and potentially life defining opportunities that aren’t called college, which by the way come with price tags that can total into the hundreds of thousands. Ah, but I go on far too long. I have enjoyed our conversation.
Pingback: How Education Can Work: Let Meg Tell You The Ways « Life&Ink
When I was in HS, I was involved in a lot of clubs and I also had an after school job for awhile. There were days when I would go to school early to work on the extra curricular stuff (I think our start time was 7:30?), go to school all day, go to work after school, then drive back to school at night to work on more projects. This schedule only intensified once I got into college. There were long years of my life when I felt guilty if I got more than 5 hours of sleep because there must have been something else I could have been spending my time on. But, I’m all grown up now (mostly) and while I don’t condone forcing kids to live and work like this just to “get by,” my years doing so have definitely put things into perspective for me. So, at least there’s a silver lining. And when your daughter is all big and grown she can share war stories like me and feel so accomplished with the fact that she just survived it all!
Ah yes! I do understand that which you speak, I do, but convince an emotional 17 girl that!!! It’s the relentlessness of it all that gets her the most. She feels like she can’t pause and reflect. It’s like not being allowed to get hungry before you have to eat again and I think it is causing her indigestion! I also understand her pushing back on the pressure she feels she and her classmates receive from school, such as the lectures they get about last year’s class got this many million in scholarship dollars, how many million is your class going to get? She doesn’t like where the emphasis is put, she feels quality is overlooked in the pursuit of achieving what the school can measure and use to call the school a success. I question what I have seen her go through. But alas, in the end, this too shall pass, and she will become more the master of her own ship and these years will be but a distant memory. Thanks for your input and for contributing to the conversation, both are greatly appreciated!
I had a college professor who refused to actually give tests. I mean sure, we HAD them because it was requirement of the school – but if you put any answer to the question, it was marked as correct. He was big on asking the question “is learning a product or a process?” It was his opinion, that in his classes, learning was a process. Maybe you didn’t remember the exact answer to HIS test – that didn’t mean that you didn’t learn ten billion other things. As long as you participated – you got an A.
Of course, these were upper level “communication” courses – so it wasn’t like he was graduating scientists and mathmaticians and other areas of study which are quantifiable. It was more about having the ability to THINK and PONDER and use information to back up your viewpoints…
I wish every class I had ever attended had been more like that and less about the damn grades, the exams, the scores and benchmarks.
Amen. THINK and PONDER? You mean like in critical thinking? Having an original thought? Then forming the words to express said thought? Oh such silly notions!
The class you just described, Meg would adore. She likes to discuss, to formulate ideas and ways to express them. She likes to listen to what others think, process and then see if corrections are necessary in her opinions. She hates having stuff crammed down her throat with no reflection, no time to actually ingest. It’s like the information is put in a temporary folder to be accessed for the test and then dumped. But we are so fixated on numbers, scores, rankings, etc to what I believe, as does my daughter, to the detriment of actually learning. But how to we change this??? The million dollar question.
Thanks for stopping by and for your comment. I appreciated your thoughtful words and the opportunity to think about them, not to mention to be sarcastic for a moment! All good stuff!