May. 20, 2009 - Welcome to My World.
I notice a quite curious phenomenon each May. My friends with kids in school begin complaining about the steep step up in school projects due. Being a home educator and taking an attitude of benign neglect much of the time, I find this curious. It's the kid who has the project, right? So why are the parents stressed?
Actually, I know why the parents are stressed. Few of us have the wherewithal to really let our kid sink and sink deep. You can see this in the soapbox derby commercial currently running on TV. It's a great ad because any of us who have ever had a kid in an AWANA or Cub Scout derby event knows it's true that many kids have little to do with the design and execution of their cars. On the fairy tale commercial ending, the kid with the obviously kid made and clunky car wins and the child who is handed the fancy and obvious adult designed car to race loses.
Real life isn't quite that way, is it?
A small scale example. We signed our kid up for an enrichment science class at a homeschool co-op. In my mind, this class is purely "extra" and I gave nary the first second of attention to what he did in it. He's middle school aged and old enough to handle his own assignments and commitments.
Which he mostly did. A few weeks he didn't have his homework prepared. That's embarassing and he didn't like that much. So he learned to write down assignments. He picked and designed his own experiment concerning light and heat. About half way through, he came to us completely stoked about a cooking idea he had involving a box and a light bulb. It sure burst his bubble to learn he was 40 years too late for the Easy Bake Oven. No matter, he is now thinking of halogens to cook chicken. I'm sure he'll come to some ideas about energy efficiency on his own, given enough time.
Not to brag, but this kid routinely ranks in the top 1-2% nationwide on achievement tests reflecting science knowledge. But his board for the last day of class Science Fair? To say that the board did not reflect that fact would be kind, far too kind. It was a kid generated board of a kid generated experiment by a kid doing this for the second or third time ever. Don't get me wrong, I offered some friendly advice on how to jazz up the board. He chose not to. Whether he noticed a discrepancy between his and the other kids' boards, I have no idea. If he did, it didn't bother him.
From here, I would like to jump straight to the moral high ground. It's such an easy leap for me to do, having practiced my self-righteous flip straight into a holier-than-thou double back many a time. The fact is, if this class was going on my kid's "official transcript" and the grade affected his "class rank," I'd probably be cutting and pasting and insisting on Excel spreadsheets with the rest of the bunch.
I'm glad we homeschool because we can resist a lot of that pressure and really concentrate on student as worker, teacher/parent as facilitator without those lines becoming quite so blurred. But I wonder about the world we're sending our kids out into, a world where your best honest effort often isn't valued or rewarded. So, no moral gymnastics, just futher pondering on our nation's educational system.
Blessings, Holly
