Posted in Other Ramblings

Another homeschooling Mom and I bring the kids to the Boston Museum of Science every month.  We sort of co-op science together and well, it a whole different post on why we do that.  We went yesterday and you will not guess what struck me the most.

Was it the electricity show we went to? Nope
Was it the cotton-topped tamarin monkeys?  Maybe for CPG, but nope, not for me.
Was it the baby chicks that were hatching while we were there? Nope - although they were really cute.
Was it watching our kids know where all the organs went on a 3D human body model (puzzle)?  Nope, although the museum volunteer seemed pretty impressed by that.

What struck me the most was not a museum exhibit at all.  And in fact had very little to do with the museum at all.

It was watching all the school groups.  There were tons of field trips there yesterday of a wide variety of ages and quite honestly I felt really bad for these kids.  There are a whole bunch of reasons why.

The big reason is that there is absolutely no way that they can get anything out of this field trip.  It truly was a huge waste of taxpayer money to send them.

First of all they are only there for about 2 hours - maybe 3 tops.  We got there at 10:00 AM and tons of school groups were getting there at the same time.  All morning long the place was packed.  After lunch the place has basically emptied out.  I didn't really see any more school groups there after 1:00 PM - and they did eat lunch before they left.

So, this is a rather large museum that really you could spend all day at and still miss a few things.  They are spending a couple of hours - but they are still trying to fit in the whole museum.

Which leads to my gross generalization of a statement: "Public School kids have absolutely no attention span at all".  I am beginning to think that schools cause ADHD.  Really, they run into a room.  Press all the buttons.  Don't bother to wait to see what will happen.  And then just run out.  It was truly one of the weirdest things I have ever seen.  While we would spend an hour in one room exploring it fully (we left it up to the kids to decide when it was time to move on), we would easily see 100 or so kids come flying through while we were still there.  Truly, baby Boo had more of an attention span than these kids.

There was no interaction with the exhibits. There was no tying it to what they have been learning in school - most of the chaperones were parents who didn't seem to know what the kids were learning in school anyway.  There couldn't possibly have been any learning at all.

If a child did in fact get caught up in an exhibit, within 5 minutes his chaperone would be calling out "Johnny, it's time to move on" And he would have to leave because the 5 other classmates she was also watching had already left.  I am not blaming her for that - she does have to watch 5-6 kids, and she does need to get through the whole museum in a couple of hours.

I am not really bashing public school here - for all I know some of the groups may have been private schools.  And I truly believe that everyone does what is best for their family, or even each individual child.  I guess I don't understand why they need to rush through like that.  Why can't they focus on a couple of areas only and spend all their time there?  Some people would say that would be a waste of a trip, but i would disagree.  They could study the subject in their classrooms and really explore that area and come away with new knowledge.  There is no way they could have done that the way they go through now.  Isn't quality really better than quantity.

We did not see the whole museum yesterday, nor did we plan to.  But both my girls came home yesterday bursting with new information and spent well over an hour clueing their father in to all they had learned and seen.

So who really had the better day?