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!
Trying to Mom 