Wishes and Horses

  

By Kristin

I haven't seen "Mike" in class for four days and the online attendance system shows he's skipping most of his classes, so I phone his mother during my prep period to let her know.  Mike and his mom don't have internet, and she's not home when the automatic system calls to report an absence.  This is the third time I've called her in two weeks; she is not happy to hear from me, and I don't really blame her. 

She vents for about ten minutes, and I listen.  Mike hates school and she doesn't know what else to try.  I tell her I care about her son, and that he needs to come to class before I can help him love school.  But I know he hates school - I can see it in the way his body refuses to settle into the desk -  and I feel like I'm lying to her.  The call ends and I call "Steven's" home.   

Both Steven and Mike have a difficult time sitting still, and they both cut school.  Like many teachers I try to give students the chance to move but let's be realistic - my classroom is filled with desks.

Washington's Becca Bill , the legislation that works to fight truancy, recognizes that not every child will attend school if he has to sit all day. The Becca Bill requires schools to try different interventions to engage a child.  One of those interventions is to offer vocational programs.  Vocational programs?  We have classrooms where the metal and wood shops used to be.  We still have an autoshop, but the classes are already too full. Why were the other programs cut?  Because the state test kids have to pass to graduate doesn't test carpentry skills.  The state would like to say that every child will succeed in college, even though it's unreasonable to expect a child to pay to be as miserable in college as they are in a traditional high school.

If a child needs to attend school in order to be taught, shouldn't the state be paying attention to the strategies that help children attend school?  Here's my advice to policy makers:  return vocational programs to the schools.  They give us leverage to engage every child.  Academic skills can be taught through the medium of a vocational skill, but I can't teach reading to a child who doesn't come to class.  Let's use taxpayer money to create productive, successful, happy and healthy citizens and stop fooling ourselves that the only route to success is through the machinery of a university education.  It is not for everyone.

I wish I could steer Mike and Steven toward their passions and that my school had a variety of programs, but if wishes were horses beggars would ride.  Tomorrow I'll be on the phone again, or maybe Mike and Steven will be in class and I'll tackle the riddle of how to turn them on to reading and writing.  But really, I'm begging.  The horses were sold to make room for academics, and the pastures are filled with desks - some of them empty.

Comments

[www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=507022356]

Mark...Ideally, academics should be enough...but some kids (hard to fathom for you, me, teachers and kids who have known success academically) have never had a positive experience at school within the academic realm...all these kids may know of academics is failure, humiliation and struggle. So of course they hate it...the same reason I hate the smell of the dentist office and evade it.

[Kristin]

Mark, I think not every child is interested in academics. There are some students who love their teachers enough, or want the carrot of the grade, or who get engaged in the material because of creative teaching practices, but there are some kids who don't like it no matter what.

Their numbers aren't great enough, I think, to sway the offerings in their favor - hence the cutting of many vocational ed. programs. Every year there are kids who drop out because they aren't interested in academics if it means sitting in a desk with paper and pen. Until they drop out, they absorb a lot of energy because we're all working really hard to get them to come.

[Mark]

It's interesting you bring this up. I've been working with some of my student-athletes lately, and the line is that they need their sports, it keeps them coming to school. I don't disagree, but I think it begs the exact question you're asking: why isn't SCHOOL enough to keep them coming to school?