Today, bright and early, a whole lotta kids were poked and prodded out of bed, force fed cheerios or poptarts, swaddled in new and uncomfortable clothing and summarily delivered into the maws of the educational system.
We saw it coming from the frenzy at Walmart and Office Depot for pencils and paper and the right kinds of binders to Academy where pint sized quarterbacks (quarter-pints?) stood solidly and proudly while being fitted for all that plastic armor football players need to wear to keep from killing each other in the name of sportsmanship.
All this stuff costs a lot of money. Anyone with kids knows starting about July, the places that sell school supplies all have kiosks of lists- list after list of what parents need to buy to prepare their children for the school year.
So this morning I had another one of my (increasingly and disturbingly frequent) conversations with Ward that starts out "Remember when we were kids?"
"Remember when we were kids and there was the School Store? You lined up on the first day of school with the rest of the class and stood in line. The old lady (who was probably 30) served you from behind the dutch door. All your school supplies- pencils, erasers, crayons, ruler, notebooks- could be had for like $5.00 and we all got the same thing."
Once we got old enough for "gym suits" the gym teacher ordered them and they cost like $20.
None of this school supplies costing several hundred dollars crap.
Ya, I know that was a million years ago and considering the cost of living and all, that $25 my parents spent on school supplies...STILL doesn't = several hundred dollars so shut the hell up.
How hard is it for families to cough up that kind of money, especially in this economy?
This hard- the same day Ricky and his minions (about 30,000 of them) were having their big ol' hootinanny for god inside the air-conditioned Astrodome, the convention center about 10 minutes away was overrun by more than 100,000 people standing in line outside in the heat for...free school supplies, and they had to turn quite a few over that 100,000 mark away. By 10am.
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/08/290973/prayer-rally-school-supplies/
Luckily, we don't have to worry about that. We home school.
Our son was still abed this morning when the school bus rumbled across the wooden bridges at the road. In fact, I'm pretty sure he's never even SEEN the school bus rumble across the wooden bridges at the road.
Sure we have to buy his curriculum and go on field trips and get him involved in sports and stuff, but we work our own hours, are free to vacation when we wish, and don't have to buy any school-appropriate clothing. We feel fortunate to get any clothing at all on the Feral Boy of Dedmon's Branch.
We also pay school taxes.
Happily.
Back when I was young (this won't be so bad- I promise) I'd hear my grandmother complain that they still had to pay school taxes even though there were no kids at home anymore. She said it wasn't fair to them and grandpa quietly but firmly interjected (the one and only time he ever did) that they had US- between my mom and my aunt there were 5 grandchildren. They were paying taxes for OUR schools. And she'd quit bitching about it. Till next time.
We don't have grandkids and all our nieces and nephews are out of the public school system, but we still pay our school tax. We have friends who say "You don't use the school system, doesn't it make you angry to pay the taxes for it?"
No. No it doesn't.
Because it matters. It matters that children whose parents can't (or don't want to) home school them have a safe place to be during the day. It matters that the schools are staffed with caring competent teachers who have enough supplies to do their jobs.
It matters very much that Rick Perry says there should be no such thing as public schools regulated nationally. That he's cut billions of dollars for schools and teachers in an apparent attempt to wrest the Trophy of Absolute Ignorance from Mississippi once and for all and proudly display it in his cabinet right next to the ones for "Most Teen Pregnancies" and "Highest number of minimum wage jobs" and right under the spotlight glowing on "Largest percentage of citizens without health insurance".
See, just like a health care tax would supply free care to everyone in the country via Universal Single Payer coverage- there would be no need for individual insurance with its accompanying premiums, but you could certainly buy it if you wanted to (like in Canada).
Paying school tax so all children can go to school is the right thing to do. Making truly good health care available FREE to citizens is the right thing to do.
At least I think so. Guess I'm just a terrible American.
photo
photo by Sheri Dixon
Showing posts with label public schools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label public schools. Show all posts
Monday, August 22, 2011
Thursday, May 26, 2011
Book Review- "Weapons of Mass Instruction"
"Weapons of Mass Instruction", by John Taylor Gatto isn't a new release, nor a bargain bin book find. I'd been wanting to read it since before we decided to home school Alec (and he's finishing up 6th grade now) but never got the chance.
I love this book. I love it because it validates every reason we're home schooling our son.
Both Ward and I suspected even during our own sentence in school systems (12 years for me, 16 years for Ward) that school wasn't so much about learning, about education, about donning actual thinking caps and expanding our intellectual horizons.
It seemed to both of us that we were being molded, formed, spindled and mutilated into what was CALLED "good upstanding contributing members of society" but felt a whole lot like the end result was intended to be "future Employees of the Month".
It was horrifying.
Ward is a far better person than I am. He went to school, got good grades, went to college and graduated with a shiny degree in Biology.
Me? Ummm...yeah.
When I was in junior high school, our town's schools were overcrowded and they hadn't built a new school yet so we had "split shift" schedules. 7th graders went to school from noon till 5pm and 8th and 9th graders from 7am-noon.
Our high school was a social experiment in "modular scheduling"- instead of Monday-Friday schedules, we had days 1-6. Instead of set class times, each class was 2 mods (40 minutes) or 3 mods (60 minutes). Most classes were on days 1/3/5 or 2/4/6. Before the school year started, they gave us the classes we were REQUIRED to take that year and a list of electives. We had to take X many credits to graduate. Then they let us do our own scheduling.
College-bound friends crammed themselves non-stop (except for the required 1 mod minimum for lunch) in a frenzy of grade point and credit attainment. I saw the scheduling as a different sort of challenge. My crowning achievement was senior year, day 4- I had class from 8:20-9am. And then I was free.
High school was pretty much a social event for me. Not that stupid useless crap like cheerleading and sports- I was on the school paper and a theater geek. When I was actually in the building anyway. Modular scheduling coupled with this being the '70's- before schools were on lockdown with metal detectors the exterior doors were ALL unlocked and people came and went unquestioned. There WERE school cops. We loved the school cops. They had the best weed. Or so I heard...
So it was pretty easy to come and go. I spent alot of time in the "go" mode. I'd walk to the city park down on the river- not a manicured/fountained sort of park, this was a "too swampy to build on so lets donate it to the city" sort of park. It was wild and isolated and I loved it. I'd walk to the art museum that had the glorious old fashioned gardens around it- the same beloved old historic home-turned-into-museum my mom had taken me to since I was 2 years old. During school hours.
I actually worked for the head of the English department who owned a small farm- during harvest season he'd have his teachers ask their students each day "When are you finished today? Wanna make some cash?" and off we'd go- like migrant workers in the back of his pickup to pick watermelons, or tomatoes, or pluck/process chickens. During school hours.
A few times my friends and I hopped the commuter train to Chicago in the early morning and be back home before dinner. We toured the museums, ate great (and cheap) food and generally hung around. Parental permission? Nah- they'd just worry, or worse- want to come with us. (Guess I'll find out if my mom reads my blog now...)
My POINT is that I learned more about nature study by spending quiet hours at the river's edge, more about hard physical labor at the truck farm, and more about getting around a big city sans wheels and more than pocket change than I ever learned sitting at a desk.
Here's something I've always wondered- I've always wondered how many of my classmates who went through the split shift/modular scheduling years ended up in the normal 9-2-5, because I never did. Our block of graduates hadn't graced a conventional classrooom since we were 13 years old, and I felt acutely the lack of training for "show up for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and obey someone you don't really like doing something that's probably a complete sham".
Oh, I worked. I worked full time from the time I was 16. I bussed tables. I worked at the school (teacher's aide- not tethered to a desk and alot of errand running), I worked any number of part time, half time, graveyard shifts to cobble enough money together to pay bills and stay fed. I worked at a Christmas tree lot, at an ice company, the city paper and a bank. I worked at a finance company and as a camp director. I had no pre-conceived notion of what I was "supposed" to do- other than get out and earn a living if I wanted to eat and have somewhere to live other than a cardboard box under the bridge.
In "Weapons of Mass Instruction" John Taylor Gatto takes us through the evolution of the American school system and explains beautifully what I instinctively felt- school has very little to do with education and everything to do with training a workforce to think spending 40+ hours a week at mind-numbing soul-crushing endeavors is how you're supposed to go through life.
According to the author, one huge tool in pigeonholing people at an early age and keeping them there and focused on learning answers and facts without delving into questions and reasons is standardized testing, which tell exactly nothing about intelligence, or life skills, or anything that makes a damn bit of sense in real life. Standardized tests are Big Business for the testers, an excellent way to keep students stressed and feeling unworthy, and the perfect excuse for not letting teachers...teach. Because such a huge chunk of the school year is spent "teaching to the test".
Somehow I knew that, too. When I was a senior in high school, I went to my parents and said "You know, I don't really know what I want to do for a career yet and I don't want to waste money on college till I'm sure- can I have some of my college money to maybe travel for a while?" This (seemingly sensible to me) request was met with unmitigated gales of laughter. "College money? COLLEGE MONEY?? COLLEGE MONEY??? What do you think we've been feeding and clothing you with for 18 years?"
Nevertheless, these same parents told me I HAD to take the SAT's with my friends just in case I decided I wanted to go to college. So they paid for me to sit my SAT and the morning of the test I showed up with my 2 college-bound friends. My friends went into the maws of the testing room. I hesitated at the door. I asked the woman at the door "Do you work here at the college?" She did. "If I decide I want to go to college in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years will it matter if I take the test today?"
She looked nervous.
"No. It won't matter", she said barely under her breath.
Not aware I was 40 years ahead of my time for John Taylor Gatto's Bartleby Project at the end of the book, I thanked her and turned away from the artificially lit arena of false importance and spent the day reading in the sunshine.
Spend all of a beautiful day sweating over which little dots to blacken in response to questions that have no real significance to Life, the Universe and Everything?
"I prefer not to".
I love this book. I love it because it validates every reason we're home schooling our son.
Both Ward and I suspected even during our own sentence in school systems (12 years for me, 16 years for Ward) that school wasn't so much about learning, about education, about donning actual thinking caps and expanding our intellectual horizons.
It seemed to both of us that we were being molded, formed, spindled and mutilated into what was CALLED "good upstanding contributing members of society" but felt a whole lot like the end result was intended to be "future Employees of the Month".
It was horrifying.
Ward is a far better person than I am. He went to school, got good grades, went to college and graduated with a shiny degree in Biology.
Me? Ummm...yeah.
When I was in junior high school, our town's schools were overcrowded and they hadn't built a new school yet so we had "split shift" schedules. 7th graders went to school from noon till 5pm and 8th and 9th graders from 7am-noon.
Our high school was a social experiment in "modular scheduling"- instead of Monday-Friday schedules, we had days 1-6. Instead of set class times, each class was 2 mods (40 minutes) or 3 mods (60 minutes). Most classes were on days 1/3/5 or 2/4/6. Before the school year started, they gave us the classes we were REQUIRED to take that year and a list of electives. We had to take X many credits to graduate. Then they let us do our own scheduling.
College-bound friends crammed themselves non-stop (except for the required 1 mod minimum for lunch) in a frenzy of grade point and credit attainment. I saw the scheduling as a different sort of challenge. My crowning achievement was senior year, day 4- I had class from 8:20-9am. And then I was free.
High school was pretty much a social event for me. Not that stupid useless crap like cheerleading and sports- I was on the school paper and a theater geek. When I was actually in the building anyway. Modular scheduling coupled with this being the '70's- before schools were on lockdown with metal detectors the exterior doors were ALL unlocked and people came and went unquestioned. There WERE school cops. We loved the school cops. They had the best weed. Or so I heard...
So it was pretty easy to come and go. I spent alot of time in the "go" mode. I'd walk to the city park down on the river- not a manicured/fountained sort of park, this was a "too swampy to build on so lets donate it to the city" sort of park. It was wild and isolated and I loved it. I'd walk to the art museum that had the glorious old fashioned gardens around it- the same beloved old historic home-turned-into-museum my mom had taken me to since I was 2 years old. During school hours.
I actually worked for the head of the English department who owned a small farm- during harvest season he'd have his teachers ask their students each day "When are you finished today? Wanna make some cash?" and off we'd go- like migrant workers in the back of his pickup to pick watermelons, or tomatoes, or pluck/process chickens. During school hours.
A few times my friends and I hopped the commuter train to Chicago in the early morning and be back home before dinner. We toured the museums, ate great (and cheap) food and generally hung around. Parental permission? Nah- they'd just worry, or worse- want to come with us. (Guess I'll find out if my mom reads my blog now...)
My POINT is that I learned more about nature study by spending quiet hours at the river's edge, more about hard physical labor at the truck farm, and more about getting around a big city sans wheels and more than pocket change than I ever learned sitting at a desk.
Here's something I've always wondered- I've always wondered how many of my classmates who went through the split shift/modular scheduling years ended up in the normal 9-2-5, because I never did. Our block of graduates hadn't graced a conventional classrooom since we were 13 years old, and I felt acutely the lack of training for "show up for 8 hours a day 5 days a week and obey someone you don't really like doing something that's probably a complete sham".
Oh, I worked. I worked full time from the time I was 16. I bussed tables. I worked at the school (teacher's aide- not tethered to a desk and alot of errand running), I worked any number of part time, half time, graveyard shifts to cobble enough money together to pay bills and stay fed. I worked at a Christmas tree lot, at an ice company, the city paper and a bank. I worked at a finance company and as a camp director. I had no pre-conceived notion of what I was "supposed" to do- other than get out and earn a living if I wanted to eat and have somewhere to live other than a cardboard box under the bridge.
In "Weapons of Mass Instruction" John Taylor Gatto takes us through the evolution of the American school system and explains beautifully what I instinctively felt- school has very little to do with education and everything to do with training a workforce to think spending 40+ hours a week at mind-numbing soul-crushing endeavors is how you're supposed to go through life.
According to the author, one huge tool in pigeonholing people at an early age and keeping them there and focused on learning answers and facts without delving into questions and reasons is standardized testing, which tell exactly nothing about intelligence, or life skills, or anything that makes a damn bit of sense in real life. Standardized tests are Big Business for the testers, an excellent way to keep students stressed and feeling unworthy, and the perfect excuse for not letting teachers...teach. Because such a huge chunk of the school year is spent "teaching to the test".
Somehow I knew that, too. When I was a senior in high school, I went to my parents and said "You know, I don't really know what I want to do for a career yet and I don't want to waste money on college till I'm sure- can I have some of my college money to maybe travel for a while?" This (seemingly sensible to me) request was met with unmitigated gales of laughter. "College money? COLLEGE MONEY?? COLLEGE MONEY??? What do you think we've been feeding and clothing you with for 18 years?"
Nevertheless, these same parents told me I HAD to take the SAT's with my friends just in case I decided I wanted to go to college. So they paid for me to sit my SAT and the morning of the test I showed up with my 2 college-bound friends. My friends went into the maws of the testing room. I hesitated at the door. I asked the woman at the door "Do you work here at the college?" She did. "If I decide I want to go to college in 5 years or 10 years or 20 years will it matter if I take the test today?"
She looked nervous.
"No. It won't matter", she said barely under her breath.
Not aware I was 40 years ahead of my time for John Taylor Gatto's Bartleby Project at the end of the book, I thanked her and turned away from the artificially lit arena of false importance and spent the day reading in the sunshine.
Spend all of a beautiful day sweating over which little dots to blacken in response to questions that have no real significance to Life, the Universe and Everything?
"I prefer not to".
Monday, May 10, 2010
Texas Public Schools- You've Done It Again
Fine. I'll admit it. I was mostly asleep while listening to the news this morning about 5am or so. But my ears perked up and I had a brief, shining moment of hope for the (rightly) maligned public school system in Texas.
First came the push for avowed ultra-fundamental Christians to strong-arm their beliefs onto not only Texan students, but students nationwide thanks to the 'other end of the spectrum' California not being able to afford textbooks anymore. Where in past years, the two biggest buyers of school textbooks canceled each other out and balanced each other in what our students learned, the textbook manufacturers are now poised to bend to the will of the Texas textbook review board- and as Texas leans, so will lean the Nation. Strike One.
Then came the stunning revelation that this self-same group of people decided to EXCLUDE certain historical figures from the history books it's ordering. But not to worry- it's no one important like Thomas Jefferson. Oh. No. Wait.
One of the people deleted from history as planning to be taught to our children IS Thomas Jefferson. No longer an "Important Historical Figure".
Kind of thrown under the bus with poor ex-planet Pluto. Strike Two.
This deciding board in Texas is not comprised of people you'd assume- people like teachers, or professors, or experts in anything school-like. There's a nice couple from not too far north of here who stalwartly strive to Bring God Back Into School and get that nasty old EEEEEvolution out of the science books.
http://www.textbookreviews.org/index.html?content=about.htm
There's the head of the whole shebang- a dentist. A dentist who was VOTED OFF OF the school text book board but has made it his goal to shove all of his fundamental agenda straight into law before he has to step down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McLeroy
So I was sleepily giddy when I heard the teaser for the upcoming news story- something like "Texas public schools to change the maximum student per classroom laws".
I thought "FINALLY"- one of the big reasons we decided to home school was the 1 teacher per 22 student ratio in our public schools- 1 teacher, NO teacher aide(s) or helpers and 22 tiny 5 year old minds and bodies to nurture and encourage. Impossible. The thought that there was finally going to be a more sensible teacher/student ratio in the lower grades was exciting.
So I fought off dozing off to hear the story.
Here's where it got weird.
The law is not so much going to be "changed" as "abolished". Seems that it costs the public schools alot of money building extra classrooms and hiring extra teachers, and what's really being suggested is that we need to have 1 teacher for MORE THAN 22 students, grades kindergarten-four.
Of course. If we care so little about details like separation of church and state, teaching scientific facts, or keeping the FOUNDING FATHERS in our history books, why should it matter that our smallest, youngest, most impressionable citizens are being packed into classrooms like cattle in the feedlots? Strike Three.
What a coup for the Ritalin pushers.
First came the push for avowed ultra-fundamental Christians to strong-arm their beliefs onto not only Texan students, but students nationwide thanks to the 'other end of the spectrum' California not being able to afford textbooks anymore. Where in past years, the two biggest buyers of school textbooks canceled each other out and balanced each other in what our students learned, the textbook manufacturers are now poised to bend to the will of the Texas textbook review board- and as Texas leans, so will lean the Nation. Strike One.
Then came the stunning revelation that this self-same group of people decided to EXCLUDE certain historical figures from the history books it's ordering. But not to worry- it's no one important like Thomas Jefferson. Oh. No. Wait.
One of the people deleted from history as planning to be taught to our children IS Thomas Jefferson. No longer an "Important Historical Figure".
Kind of thrown under the bus with poor ex-planet Pluto. Strike Two.
This deciding board in Texas is not comprised of people you'd assume- people like teachers, or professors, or experts in anything school-like. There's a nice couple from not too far north of here who stalwartly strive to Bring God Back Into School and get that nasty old EEEEEvolution out of the science books.
http://www.textbookreviews.org/index.html?content=about.htm
There's the head of the whole shebang- a dentist. A dentist who was VOTED OFF OF the school text book board but has made it his goal to shove all of his fundamental agenda straight into law before he has to step down.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_McLeroy
So I was sleepily giddy when I heard the teaser for the upcoming news story- something like "Texas public schools to change the maximum student per classroom laws".
I thought "FINALLY"- one of the big reasons we decided to home school was the 1 teacher per 22 student ratio in our public schools- 1 teacher, NO teacher aide(s) or helpers and 22 tiny 5 year old minds and bodies to nurture and encourage. Impossible. The thought that there was finally going to be a more sensible teacher/student ratio in the lower grades was exciting.
So I fought off dozing off to hear the story.
Here's where it got weird.
The law is not so much going to be "changed" as "abolished". Seems that it costs the public schools alot of money building extra classrooms and hiring extra teachers, and what's really being suggested is that we need to have 1 teacher for MORE THAN 22 students, grades kindergarten-four.
Of course. If we care so little about details like separation of church and state, teaching scientific facts, or keeping the FOUNDING FATHERS in our history books, why should it matter that our smallest, youngest, most impressionable citizens are being packed into classrooms like cattle in the feedlots? Strike Three.
What a coup for the Ritalin pushers.
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