Sometimes Education is just Hard Work

If we've trained our children to learn only in the most colorful, entertaining, and sensory-tickling environments, we've short-changed them in preparing them for life. Much of life's responsibilities are simply mundane. Cleaning the porcelain furniture, mowing the lawn, pulling weeds, taking out the garbage, changing diapers, washing the bird poop off the car, vacuuming--no, picking white dog hair out of a black carpet, dusting everything, washing dishes, mopping the floor, making the bed, etc., and that's just part of the responsibilities at home.

Most every career or paying job has its moments of mundane tasks, too. Everyone needs to work a few bad jobs just so they will be able to recognize a good job when it comes along. I used to mow lawns and babysit before I got my first withholding paycheck job at a Dairy Queen after school during my senior year in high school. For two summers during college, I worked watermelons-- the first year in the office, and the second outside as a straw boss on the conveyor line. I've done secretarial work, I've taught in public and private and home schools, and I've partnered in a retail store.

The best job I ever had was as a part-time library director during my children's middle and high school years. I didn't miss a thing, and still had something left at the end of the day to pursue other interests. One of the easiest jobs I ever had was as a college library assistant, but emotionally, it was one of the dreariest because I wasn't allowed to do anything but check out books and tell students where the bookstore and bathroom were. And that came after I had managed every aspect of a public library for nine years. But since I didn't have a master's degree in library science, I wasn't allowed to do real library work.

One of the most demanding jobs I ever had was working as a paraprofessional at a high school while I worked on my master's degree in the evenings so I could eventually do real library work in a public school. Two of the worst years I ever had was teaching in public school where there was very little support for newbies, and trying to work in spite of an impossible schedule and working situation under some people who never should've been around children or the educational system in the first place. But that experience helped me to recognize a better school environment later where the staff received a lot of support from each other and their administrators.

In every job situation I learned something, even if it was for no other reasons than surviving the job or garnering some good writing fodder.

Somewhere along the line, children need to learn how to work hard in spite of difficult or mundane surroundings, because most will experience those very things in some jobs later on. A big part of preparing them for life is teaching them how to persevere, how to get back up after they're knocked down, and to not let a soul-consuming work environment destroy them.

Years ago my dad shared an old fable with me when I was going through a tough time. A king wanted an inscription put on a ring that would speak the truth in any situation-- to make him happy when he was sad, and to keep him humble when he was on top of the world. After much searching, his wise men brought him a ring with the inscription, This, too, shall pass. I can't tell you how many times I thought of that through the years.

Learning should be fun, fulfilling, mind-expanding, and at times just plain ol' mundane or hard work if we want to prepare children for life. To teach them that life and work is composed of both periods of ups and downs and how to navigate through it all is the truth.

Ups or downs, good or bad, happy or sad, hard or easy, more or less, healthy or sick, or any other dichotomy of life, this, too, shall pass.

Education Overkill

overkill - noun 2. : an excess of something (as a quantity or an action) beyond what is required or suitable for a particular purpose. [Merriam-Webster Online]

I hope you will please read this post with an open mind and understanding that my intent is to improve the public education system. A less dramatic title that would be just as fitting is Less is More.

I don't envy the task of the classroom teachers. The few years I taught just about did me in, and I thought I'd never set foot on a campus again. So I write this knowing that teachers have one of the toughest jobs out there. And I've worked with so many hard-working teachers who loved the students they taught and wanted only the best for them.

When a system fails to prepare kids for life, which these days is mistakenly and nearsightedly linked with less than stellar and especially failing standardized test scores, the knee-jerk reaction of the powers that be-- within education and without-- is to conjure up more accountability and tests and methods and paperwork and more micro-managing and pressure on top of the already over-burdened shoulders of teacher. Teachers are carrying a disproportionate amount of the responsibility. Parents and students should bear their fair share, too.

"Are the TEKS you're teaching today posted on your whiteboard for any administrator to see when they walk into your classroom today?" And my personal favorite-- coming up with new acronyms and buzz words for a new or improved or  latest educational trends that will solve everyone's problems, which involves more training and more training and more training... often with the same results: that the system is failing to prepare kids for life. They have a transcript that says they passed what the State required them to pass, but somehow it doesn't segue into real life. And very few school systems are even looking at the students after they graduate.

My children were home-schooled their 3rd - 6th grades, and they could do in under two hours the equivalent of a day's work in public school. After they finished their book work, they played in the barn or worked with their 4-H show animals or video-taped mock news and weather reports or dozens of other activities they thought up on their own. The main thing they learned during their early school years was to take responsibility for their learning. 

They had learned how to learn. 

Without a complicated list of TEKS. 
Without a full-time teacher working with them. 

Most of their school work involved sitting down at the dining table, opening their books, reading the instructions themselves, and doing their work. When they couldn't figure something out for themselves, they came to me.  I didn't stand over them watching everything they did. I didn't constantly have to goose or threaten them to finish. They weren't overwhelmed with tons of school work daily or homework in the evening. In homeschool, when you finished your book work, you were finished for the day. And even with as little time as they spent doing bookwork, they still learned the skills they needed to function successfully in life. They entered public school in the seventh grade and graduated high school #2 and #1 in their respective grades.

When I started homeschooling my children, it was almost unheard of, and definitely a radical idea. A lady stopped me at the post office one day and asked me, "Who gave you permission to do this?" like we must've been breaking the law or something. It shook up the status quo of how a child was supposed to be educated, which was not my intention. I even had to change my pre-conceived notions of what education entailed, and it became such a freeing thought to realize that learning could take place without a chalk board (this dates me) and a teacher's desk in front of my kids.

The most exciting thing about learning at home was that the classroom walls disappeared and my kids could learn anywhere-- at the post office, at the grocery store, at the local airport, at the cemetery, at the fast food or convenience store counter, etc. 

Learning/education and life melded. 

The thing that bothered my kids the most when they entered public school in the 7th grade was seeing how much time was wasted on things during the school day that had nothing to do with learning and getting their work done. 

I asked some teachers how much time they thought they actually spent on teaching and facilitating learning, and the answers were from 1/4 to 1/2 of the entire school day. Shish. I saw a report that stated teachers only spend 25% of their school day actually teaching. The rest of their time is taken up with classroom/individual discipline, changing classes, calling roll, waiting for everyone to finish, documentation, parent/teacher communication, writing lesson plans, grading student work, developing relationships with the students, and those infinitely long days of Benchmark practice testing and studying the results and re-teaching those weak areas. 

Our government has a way of turning good intentions for education into a monstrosity of inefficiency, redundancy, and innovation-killing bureaucracy. The most important decisions about what happens in the classroom are made by folks with little knowledge and experience in the classroom, or they've been out of the classroom for so long, they are out of touch. And on that note, here a few more thoughts for the powers that be:

• Let active teachers have more say in making decisions about public education and what goes on in the classroom.
• Instead of piling on more pressure for teachers to teach exorbitant amounts of information that most students will not retain unless it applies to them directly in life, teach less, and teach it well.
• Teach students to take responsibility for their learning.
• Simplify the TEKS; don't micro-manage every little thing a teacher does in the classroom.
• Take the shackles off the teachers and administrators to innovate; give schools the freedom to climb out of the box of preconceived notions about what every school and classroom should look and sound like.
• Bring real life learning and application to education. Give students challenges to solve world or state or community or school problems. Or economic or social or humanity problems. 
• Let teachers slow down. Let them breathe. 
• Defend and support your teachers.
• Defend and support and keep your librarians. They are information specialists who are extremely important when it comes to teaching students how to evaluate information in this information age. Just look at the media, and especially social media to see this skill is sorely needed.
• Pair new teachers with veteran teachers. Don't leave rookies stuck out on a limb to learn everything by trial and error.
• Unless teachers are newbies, let go of some of that eternal inservice training and give teachers more time to prepare their own classrooms and lessons that apply to their subject.
• Let students who grasp something quicker teach other students who need more time.
• The teacher learns more than the students, so let students help teach.
• Give students real responsibility and leadership in school, not just more busy work to keep them out of trouble. 
• A fellow teacher from Great Britain told me her school gave students two recesses -  morning and afternoon- even through high school. I think they're on to something there. Otherwise, students create their own time for socializing and resting their brains-- usually during classroom time.
• We have to have smaller student to teacher ratios for teachers to be able to truly know each student and accurately assess their knowledge and skills beyond the multiple choice mentality. Another fellow teacher educated outside of our country told me he saw his first multiple choice test in college.
• We have to un-school kids' thinking about school-- that it's not this necessary evil we're forcing them to endure until they can really get out and live. School is preparing them for life, and knowledge, skills, and habits they learn or fail to learn in school will directly affect their quality of life later. Most of them don't get that.
• Grades don't mean a darn thing if students fail to retain the knowledge or skill. 

I've written more than I should for most readers to get this far without giving up. And I don't mean to over-simplify a very complicated issue. But the system could use some simplifying during the over-hauling process. : )