Education these days...

Today, I ran into a dad from my son's kindergarten class last year.  I stopped to ask him how his son was doing in first grade.  He said his son was struggling with the work that was being expected of him.  The stress of the school day was getting released when he got home, and the family was feeling the brunt of his frustration.  The sad thing about it is that this little boy is a really sweet kid, and really tries hard to please the adults in his life.

My son had the same trouble last year.  The work they were requiring of these kindergartners was way beyond anything they should have been doing.  There were 10-12 pages of homework worksheets every week.  And these worksheets would include, for example, a page of fractions.  (And I don't mean a picture of a pizza cut into thirds, but rather the actual written notation of 1/3.)  In addition to trying to understand the concept of a top number/line/bottom number as representing a portion of a whole, the worksheets also included fraction math problems.  In kindergarten!!  

Now, my five year old was still trying to grasp the concept that 4 was less than 8, and they were trying to teach him that 1/8 was less than 1/4.  This annoyed me a great deal.  He definitely didn't understand it, and I ended up sending the worksheets back unfinished, with a note to the teacher that I didn't want my five year old doing this type of work.  Needless to say, I was not his teacher's favorite parent.

I have to explain that the elementary school in my neighborhood is a highly academic school, and they start pushing the kids in kindergarten to do things they really are not ready to do.  This continues through sixth grade.  Last year, another parent whose daughter had graduated from this school into middle school was telling me how her daughter thought that middle school was a piece of cake as compared to what she'd had to do in elementary school.  For this reason, the school is a nationally recognized blue ribbon school (whatever that means).

However, as a result of the stress of trying to do work he wasn't equipped to do and learn things he had no interest in learning, all the while being told to sit quietly because the teacher had way too many kids in her classroom, my son became a completely different kid by the end of the school year.  He became aggressive, unmanageable, and mean.  This is not his nature at all.  He was constantly being punished for bad behavior, at home and at school, when the cause of his trauma was a school system that doesn't understand how to teach five-year-olds.   I didn't see the connection between school and his behavior change until the school year ended.  Two weeks into summer break he was back to being the boy I remembered him to be.

Needless to say, I felt terrible for subjecting him to such a traumatic representation of what school could be.  The worst thing about it was that I knew better.  I've not only taken years of child development classes, but I've also spent a good amount of time listening to neurology specialists talk about the development of the human brain during the first 12 years of life.  I know there's a better way of educating.

So after that horrific year, I pulled him out of our nationally-recognized, blue-ribbon school, and put him into a Waldorf-inspired charter school.  He's also repeating kindergarten, since he didn't make their age cut-off date for first grade (which is MUCH earlier than traditional schools).  He's happy, and I'm happy.  I'm so happy about the things he's learning, and not learning, that I can't seem to shut up about it once I get started on the subject.

I will tell you all about the wonderful school he is now attending, and why I think it's so wonderful, in a later post.  I'll also add another about how I think our school system is failing our kids.  I also have to say that I believe that there are some children well-suited to the current method of teaching.

For right now, I just wonder what can be done to save the kids like the one I ran into today, whose parents are just trying to provide him with the best education they can.  Doesn't he deserve to be taught in a manner better suited to his age, gender, or learning style?  Should one-size-fits-all really apply to education?