What Happened to School Parties?

My 2nd grader came home with a list of kids in her class and a note that read “we’ll pass out Valentine cards on the 10th, if you want your child to participate.  Please bring in a shoe box or bag to place their cards.  No party.”

I don’t have to ask, because I’ve already asked in years prior – there is no party because there is no room in the schedule for a party due to constant state testing, and the endless test prep work that goes along with it.

Kids today really have it much rougher in school than I ever did.  I can remember coming home in the 2nd grade and sitting outside coloring, swinging, and watching nature for hours in the warmer months.  My daughter?  Oh, since Kindergarten she’s had to come home and do what amounts to several hours of homework most nights.  It’s actually gotten to the point where she will “forget” to pick up homework worksheets just so that she can have a break.  While some parents would call my daughter a lazy student for doing that, I can sympathize that, after seven hours at school, kids need a break!

All in K-12, I can count on one hand how many times I had legitimate homework that I couldn’t finish in ten minutes or less.  Today, my 5th grader gets a daily workload comparable to my college experience.  Every week there is a state test for him, and that requires hours upon hours of studying.  He’s required to read a novel a week and take a test on it.  He’s told to come home and do research projects and write papers.  He has to create an invention, write about it, find similar products, and fully design the thing.  And all of these tasks stack on top of one another to where he’s eating as slowly as possible when he comes home, because he knows the rest of the night he’ll be trapped in school work.

And because of this school environment and it’s constant demands, these young children rarely have any down time to reset their brains and just be kids.  That’s why I see it as a huge concern that schools won’t take the time to allow Christmas, Valentine, Easter, or other parties once kids hit 1st grade.  We aren’t even Christian in my household, but I’d still prefer my daughter get to have a Christmas party where she can relax, smile, and have fun in class at some point!

My 5th grader doesn’t even know half the names of his classmates because there is no time to actually interact and meet with these other kids.  Even their one recess a day is thirty minutes that is combined with lunch – and waiting in line for lunch, which, sometimes, it takes twenty minutes to get your food alone.  Then, if it’s too cold to go out, the gym is closed so they have to sit at the lunch tables or go back to their classrooms and quietly work.  Plus, even though the school morning officially starts at 8am and no one is tardy before 8:01, the kids must be present at 7:45 to do “morning work,” which is required, but ungraded, busy work that the teachers flip out about if they miss.

It gets to the point where you might as well forget about extracurricular activities that your children might actually enjoy, because the mantra is “school comes first,” and there is never a break in that work load.  Well, I am breaking out of that mindset, and if the 30th book report of the year doesn’t get done, too bad so sad.  I bought into that garbage that education is everything, graduated college with a 3.8 GPA, and am still looking for a job that offers a livable wage.  LIFE is what’s important, and not missing life because your face is crammed in a book takes priority with me these days.

Why are we torturing these kids now?  It’s clearly not making them smarter or making test scores any better.  The top school systems in the world let children play and think and create for themselves.  Even the Japanese, who are known for rigid and difficult schooling, don’t start standardized testing until middle school.  And Texas has seen a huge academic improvement from letting kids have an extra thirty minutes of recess a day – so WHY do we keep following the same failing trends?  Overworking kids and making every minute of their school year miserable is NOT going to get results.  We’ve proven that a thousand districts over!  So I say back off with the books and stop telling six-year-olds that they’re too old for holiday parties!

Homework and the Frustrated Parent

I can remember very clearly my K-12 educational experience in a public school.  Sure, there are some details I’ve probably forgotten, but all the way back to age 5 I can remember a substantial amount of what I learned, and at what point I learned it.  And, you know what?  I can count on my hands the number of times that I had homework in elementary school.  I admit I was a pretty good student, I always understood the material, and I was one of the first to finish my work. So, unless I wasn’t absent over the flu for 2-3 days at a time, I never had anything that I needed to bring home.

As most of us may have experienced back in the “day,” homework was usually reserved for students who did not finish their assignments in class during the allotted time – and, for most of us, we were given plenty of time to finish.  I remember the teachers even asking if everyone was done, and if kids weren’t finish, we got more time!  Back then, we didn’t have anywhere near as much karate, dance, gymnastics, football, soccer, or other after school activities to get to everyday, yet, we were allowed to enjoy our time, watch television, play outside, or just sit around playing with our toys.  So why is it that our kids today are being overloaded with academics?

I read a blog this morning on the Today Show, and I also have a lot of thoughts on this topic (post found at: http://www.today.com/parents/why-one-dad-hates-homework-much-his-kid-does-1D80149262 ).

My son started kindergarten in 2010, and it was roughly what I expected in the education.  They did a lot of hands-on fun things that had secret agendas of learning (painting to learn about how colors mix together, for instance) and they worked on memorizing letters in the alphabet, and their corresponding sounds.  Actually, that’s pretty much what I recall of my own kindergarten experience.

However, the next year, for 1st grade, I noticed a change in that my son was being issued homework to do on Monday through Thursday evenings.  At that point, we didn’t have a big schedule, so I would have him sit down and do all four days worth of homework at once.  It took about two hours to complete, not counting the reading time requirements, which he did daily instead of in one long sitting.  This homework didn’t take an impossible amount of effort, but I did notice quickly that it was all busy work invented by the teachers/school and not actually things that my son had failed to finish during his classes.  Now, I understand that some students need a lot more practice than others, but perhaps the extra work should be given to the kids who aren’t getting it or who need additional help instead of piling it onto every student.

Even though I tried to remain neutral, and always made him do his homework, it didn’t take long for my son to start feeling frustrated.  As the school year went on, I learned that many parents flat out refused to have their children do homework four nights a week, so, on many occasions, my son was the only one turning anything in.  And since, it turned out, that homework wasn’t graded (just checked off), at seven years old my kid knew, without a doubt in his mind, that homework was frivolous.

Right before the 2nd grade started, our family moved from one state to another, and the state we happened into had a very low bar set for education.  They did many things that my son had already mastered in kindergarten and I would see him get back tests about correctly identifying squares, circles, triangles, etc.  Not the geometric cubes, spheres, or cones, I mean legitimate Sesame Street level testing!  Even though the class work was pathetic, homework was still being assigned on a daily basis, and it was still pointless busy work!

The 2nd grade teacher my son ended up with was also terrible, so terrible that I transferred him to another school the following year (would have done it sooner, but the school board requires a lottery drawing to get into a school that you aren’t zoned for).  But she never had any information for me if I asked about my son’s progress, I rarely saw papers come home, and she was close to retirement and checked out without a single care for any of her students.  I directly asked this teacher about my son’s homework, and she just pointed to giant stacks of papers behind her saying “oh, it’s probably in there somewhere…”  What I came to found out on my own was that my son was even more frustrated this year, and he figured out that his teacher wasn’t doing her job, so he completely stopped turning in his homework.  But, you want to know the kicker?  He was still doing the homework every night, correctly, and just throwing it behind his dresser!  Like he was testing his teacher to see when her give-a-crap switch would flip on.

When 2013’s school year started, I had two kids in school, with my daughter going to Kindergarten in one school, and my son in another, very highly academically rated school (while they both won the transfer lottery, there were no schools taking both K and 3rd).  For my son, this was the first year of his state testing, which meant a lot of homework that took two to three hours a night to complete.  The school days are already bumped up from 6 hours to 7, and now these teachers want the kids to have up to 10 hours of their day all about school work?  I also noticed that the end of the year awards were all based on who did well on state testing and not who did well in class overall, or who excelled in math, or anything like that.  What aggravated me even more was that my daughter, who was starting Kindergarten, was also being given nightly homework.  This work she was assigned was really not worthy of doing at home, and was likely an extension of the things she was already doing at school (ie, paint numbers 1-10, count out a 100 Cheerios and bring them in a baggie to school, etc).  It was just more busy work that consumed a lot of time that should have been used on other things.

And what I especially hated was the fact that Kindergarteners are now being forced to read, something that wasn’t going on in 2010 when my son began school.  The kids are NOT being taught or allowed to sound out the words, they have to memorize giant lists of sight words, and their entire academic year hinges on these memorization skills.  I get that some words, like “who,” don’t really work phonetically, so you have to memorize them, but I think it’s disgusting that children aren’t being taught how to sound out words.  What’s going to happen when they’re older and all of a sudden they’re faced with tons of words that were never on their memorization lists?  How are they supposed to figure them out if they are learning words based on sight over sound?

Now, I can say this year has gotten better.  I finally got both kids in one decent school and I’ve notice the homework has backed off a lot.  As of today, the kids might have about 20 minutes worth of work in a night, unless there’s a test to study for or something like that.  I still think it’s ridiculous to assign homework nightly, though.  I bought into the whole scam of school where from K-12 they drill into your head that education is the only thing that matters in life.  That the world is all about what you know on paper, not the kind of person you are, or any other skill sets that you might have.  Even my mother told me not to go to the vocational school for free as a Junior and Senior, because that was for “the dumb kids who won’t go to college.”  So I worked hard on papers and projects, I graduated at the top 10% of my class, and then I went to college and took out a lot of money in college loans. I fully believed that education was so much more important than enjoying life that I never picked up a real hobby, trade, skill, or anything else.

With all of my eggs in one basket and believing that the academic path held the golden keys to my future, I left school with $40,000 in debt and NO JOBS TO BE HAD.  Despite the financial aid office assuring me constantly that I would leave school making $50k a year (in hindsight I realize they never even asked my major), the world is not the place that I was promised.   I have had offer after offer for jobs that are part-time or minimum wage, jobs that don’t even require a college degree to begin with, but there has been nothing that has shown me the guaranteed life that an education was supposed to lead to.  In fact, I make more working for myself as a freelance photographer than I likely ever will make as a college educated woman (and no, I didn’t have a fine arts or photography degree, or even one in business), and instead of figuring out that I was good at photography in high school, and pursuing that option without a mountain of college debt on my back, I believed that education was the only answer in life.  Other people I know from high school are making a good living today instructing martial arts, giving piano lessons, and being dance teachers.  The people who didn’t go to college and opened their own businesses based on their passions, the people who got apprenticeships, or the people who went to the vocational schools over college are making more money and living a better lifestyle than I am able to, all because I thought going to college was the only right path to take.

I don’t write all of this to say that academics are worthless and should be avoided, but I think children need a healthy balance, and the current state of public schools are not allowing that to happen.  We have politicians and school boards making decisions on what kids have to learn and how much homework is required each night, yet these people are not in the classrooms one bit to understand the effects of their actions!  Most of these decision-makers have never been in a classroom since they were kids themselves!  I believe that kids need to do non-school related activities and see first hand that there is more to life than passing or failing a test.  I also think that it’s high time we debunk the myth that college is a magical dream world that makes all of your hopes in life come true.  College is a great thing to experience IF you can afford it, but other than expanding my mind and introducing me to new ideas, there wasn’t a lot of new information that came out of earning my degree.  I became very good at writing twenty page papers and learning how to agree with the professor to get an A, but I didn’t leave with any real skill set, and I didn’t learn much useful information.  If you have to take out loans to attend school, you cannot afford college, and, from experience, it is not worth spending the next ten to thirty years of your life paying these loans off.  The jobs just aren’t out there like they used to be decades ago, and we need to prepare our children for this changing economy over trying to cram endless amounts of academic work down their throats.