On days like today, when I come home after a hard week's work, I just want to revert to a childlike state and spend gobs of time playing in the mud, digging for interesting little rocks, examining leaves or something like that. My soul wants to take me to some stream somewhere, to put my feet in the water a while, to hum little songs that have never existed before.
In college I sometimes had days like these. I wondered what it would be like to study one thing, one very specific thing, and make it your life's work. Like leaves. What if you were a leaf expert? A leaf scientist! I guess that is a botanist or something. But I used to day dream about that, like, what if my job was to study leaf sample after leaf sample and catalog leaves and document their similarities and differences? Wow! That would be a pretty awesome job. A peaceful job.
Instead I chose a career where peace really isn't the landscape. There are sweet moments, to be sure, but peace is rare at a public school teaching kindergarten. There's lots to prepare, lots to execute, lots to assess, lots of fires to put out, band aids to apply, tears to wipe, opinions to ignore, people to tolerate, district initiatives to refuse to adhere to. There are so many things that happen in a day, every single day. So much stimuli, it's sometimes maddening.
Teachers develop keen filters. You learn to hone in only on the things that matter most. So much has to go by the wayside, because it's impossible to do everything everyone expects you to do. The Federal Government has expectations. So does the state. The district has expectations. The administrators on campus do, too, of course. So do the parents. So do the other teachers. So do the kids. So do you. Me. Guess what? Sometimes, quite often in fact, these expectations clash. So what do you do? Who do you seek to please first? My default is always the kids. The kids and me. We seem to have goals that don't clash that often. I want them to learn a lot, have a lot of fun doing it, be kind to each other, read, write, talk, play, discover.
A lot of what the government says is good for kids just isn't. Almost everything congress pressures us to do in schools flies in the face of scientific research. It's so common for elected officials to ignore science. It's just funny at this point. But at whose expense are we laughing?
District "experts" are just as ill-informed as elected officials, if not just out right defiant. Making decisions based on research is just something these people DO NOT DO. I really can't say why, though I ask myself why all the time. Most people in leadership seem to have a real aversion to reality. It's really so annoying. Are they just lazy? Stupid? Both?
What would the world be like if we let science make the rules? What if we honored the hard facts? What kind of programs could we develop if we designed our academic activities based on what science has shown to be effective? The truth is, everything you learn in college goes right down a dark drain when you enter a public school setting. All the things your professors told you were "best practice" are just shunned by schools and even entire districts. It's too time consuming, they say, or too expensive, or too hard so let's just say arbitrary things like let's "increase rigor" and "differentiate" and see what happens! Or let's get rid of things like painting, recess, rest time, pleasure reading, singing time, problem solving, and journal writing. Let's replace those with worksheets, small group chaotic rotations, and arduous phonics activities. Let's increase rigor. Let's increase rigor so much that we teach kids how hard learning can be. Yeah! Let's teach kids that learning is really, really difficult. Let's teach them that hard work is the only thing that counts, that if you're enjoying yourself you may not be doing something right, that suffering is "good for you". Let's make kindergarteners take standardized tests that take 45 minutes at a stretch. Let's fill the school day with so much developmentally innappropriate stuff that we convince kids, sooner rather than later, that school is a terrible, heartless, uncomfortable place and that the ONLY demographic that can thrive here are the most type A, non-creative, rule following sorts of people; the people who naturally and habitually think as close to the middle of the inside of the box as possible. I just can't be a part of that kind of goal. So I don't do it. Sometimes I get in trouble. I don't follow the rules so well. I'm one of those people who left the box a long, long time ago. That's a whole different planet to me now, a memory, a relic of a reality. It's risky but, hey, who doesn't crave a little risk now and again. Besides, it's the right thing to do. That makes being a rebel easier.
But some days, instead of breaking rules, ignoring ill advised initiatives, rolling my eyes at the next new idea to rejuvenate our classrooms, I wish I could just examine leaves, for hour after blessed hour. Let the masses do what they will! My job is to study leaves. Ahhh, what a life!
