As welcome as the end of a school year can be… given all the counting down of the last few days from scores of folks kids run into…nothing is quite as optimistic and exciting as the first days of the new school year. A new beginning is on the horizon. Hope is in full force.
For argument’s sake, and seeming how a countdown to the end of school starts earlier and earlier for some reason, I can understand the sensibility in having a “balanced calendar” where schools are open “year-round”. This would eliminate some of the early shutdown some schools get out of students ready for the year to be over by the time mid-April comes even though there is still a month and a half left of school. Motivation is a key component in learning; if the motivation is just to hang in until there are a couple months off then the thread of learning is being broken, cut off, or even lost.
The traditional “school’s out for the summer” was originally in play because the majority of the students back in the day were needed to help with agricultural endeavors. I was talking to my Mother about this recently. She told me in her native Mississippi, she graduated from high school in 1960, schools would close for two weeks in September so the kids…black and white…could be available to pick the cotton crop.
I digress.
I sat down here to tell you that this is a great time of the year. Schools starting anew is a great time of the year. Why, do you ask? I’ll tell why. Students love to learn. They really do. Kids are curious. Kids are naturally inquisitive. Kids are motivated to learn. The greatest shame of it all is that kids don’t get to vote…if they did, things would not be so screwed up in the education world.
Mr. Jim Stewart, I called him “Chief”, was my boss once upon a time. Though our time together was much too brief for my liking, he imparted a great deal of wisdom that I carry in and out of classrooms and conference rooms and staff meetings and wherever the day may take me inside a school building.
Chief told me this: Education is the most resilient thing going. No matter how much adults and politicians try to screw up the process, kids still naturally want to learn.
We have not been kind to our children. High stakes testing at early levels are damaging young psyches by the score. Kids are being labeled a success or a failure based on what happened for a measly handful of hours that are supposed to represent 180 days of learning. What a joke.
This in no way shape or form mirrors real life. The testing culture is not about helping students learn…it is about politics and that is shameful.
What is great, however, is how a first grader will come charging up the sidewalk on the first day of school looking forward to seeing his friends, looking forward to lunch, looking forward to recess, but more importantly…looking forward to quickly raising up his hand as he bounces up and down in his chair because HE WANTS TO SHARE WHAT HE THINKS IS THE CORRECT ANSWER WITH HIS TEACHER. That is when a kid is the most excited in a school building and it went on before testmania got here and it will keep going on until we find our educational way back home some day. I just hope I live to see that day.
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Learning about the Indy 500 at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, thanks Mr. Disque.
A cotton patch in honor of my Mother.
Speak the rights.
Danny Johnson