Time has an interesting story on "the dropout nation." According to the article, as many as thirty percent of public school students won't complete high school!
Thanks for the link, Shawn. To save time, those of you sick of my feeble attempts at humor can skip the rest of this paragraph. First, Shelbyville? Is this really Springfield's rival from the Simpsons? Second, the author noted that some students at Shelbyville's high school play Yu Gi Oh. Wow!
In no particular order, then, some serious observations.
The author took pains to note that this is a generational thing. Dropouts beget dropouts. Dropouts do everything in their power--which may be everything they know or have been taught--to prevent this, but dropouts beget dropouts. The old Biblical assertion that "the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons" isn't a command or an unfair punishment--it's merely an observation. The pizza shilling mayor of Shelbyville worries about creating a permanent underclass. It's already there.
I can assure you that there are some who try to rise above such tendencies, to break the inertia of generations: I see them in my classes at MiraCosta. It was therefore terribly sad for me to read that the obviously bright twenty-eight year old waitress avoided the local community college because she didn't want to look stupid.
Why was that? She had come to feel stupid. Educators had seen her as a "poor investment" and shuttled her to the side. The administrators even may have told her to quit--to not come back. Her parents and family may have told her she was stupid, on the path to destruction, throwing her life away. Untrained in psychology, unable to break the pattern of their own parenting, who could blame them? Speaking more as a father than as a teacher, I can tell you that it's very hard to do anything much differently than what my parents did with me--even when I know that what my beloved mother and father--who did the best they could--were wrong. Speaking as a teacher, now, and speaking more out of my experience elsewhere than here at Charter, I can tell you that you have to fight with all you have not to sink into the malaise of the system, not to teach to the ones who are easy to teach. The system--any system--has a tendency to reproduce itself generation after generation. If it's tweaked half-heartedly by the same people who built it, well, what can you expect?
The reason most (I recall the figure 88%--but that's probably in error) of the Shelbyvillians give for dropping out is boredom or frustration with the system. Our readings the past couple of summers have taught us, if nothing else, that the system we have inherited was designed to produce a tolerance for boredom and frustration. Some students react poorly to the innoculation.
To use a tangentially related example, I can't run on a treadmill. I get bored. The problem, however, isn't the boredom. It's the fact that at the moment of boredom, I go into some pretty elaborate day dreams and, quite frankly, misstep on the machine and do damage to my limbs and torso. To keep my heart functioning, I have to be a bit more creative. (Or get Seneca on cd and listen to that.)
Boredom, therefore, isn't bad. It's what we do with the boredom that matters. My children occasionally complain to me that they are bored. I say, "congratulations!" Why? That proves the mind is active. I also say, "what can you do about it?" The options are seemingly endless--and the best of us find some way around that. Some adolescents, though, with limited ability to abstract beyond the current predicament, to see a future self even when just such a self is staring at them across the breakfast table, react only with anger and an "I'm outta here" attitude.
The fact is, we NEED some way around the institutionalized boredom, some way to tap into this energy which, traditionally, is being stomped on rather than channeled into something productive. In the 1950's, we didn't need all that creativity (it would seem) and the education system grew up to produce factory workers. Now, even factory workers need academic skills and creativity.
I apologize for the long post, but the article really struck me-particularly the elementary school principal who busies himself spotting at risk first graders. I wondered how he did it. I wondered what he looked for. I wondered if he would have seen ME as an at risk first grader and if, had I been so labelled, my life would have been different.
1 comment:
Thanks for the link, Shawn. To save time, those of you sick of my feeble attempts at humor can skip the rest of this paragraph. First, Shelbyville? Is this really Springfield's rival from the Simpsons? Second, the author noted that some students at Shelbyville's high school play Yu Gi Oh. Wow!
In no particular order, then, some serious observations.
The author took pains to note that this is a generational thing. Dropouts beget dropouts. Dropouts do everything in their power--which may be everything they know or have been taught--to prevent this, but dropouts beget dropouts. The old Biblical assertion that "the sins of the fathers are visited on the sons" isn't a command or an unfair punishment--it's merely an observation. The pizza shilling mayor of Shelbyville worries about creating a permanent underclass. It's already there.
I can assure you that there are some who try to rise above such tendencies, to break the inertia of generations: I see them in my classes at MiraCosta. It was therefore terribly sad for me to read that the obviously bright twenty-eight year old waitress avoided the local community college because she didn't want to look stupid.
Why was that? She had come to feel stupid. Educators had seen her as a "poor investment" and shuttled her to the side. The administrators even may have told her to quit--to not come back. Her parents and family may have told her she was stupid, on the path to destruction, throwing her life away. Untrained in psychology, unable to break the pattern of their own parenting, who could blame them? Speaking more as a father than as a teacher, I can tell you that it's very hard to do anything much differently than what my parents did with me--even when I know that what my beloved mother and father--who did the best they could--were wrong. Speaking as a teacher, now, and speaking more out of my experience elsewhere than here at Charter, I can tell you that you have to fight with all you have not to sink into the malaise of the system, not to teach to the ones who are easy to teach. The system--any system--has a tendency to reproduce itself generation after generation. If it's tweaked half-heartedly by the same people who built it, well, what can you expect?
The reason most (I recall the figure 88%--but that's probably in error) of the Shelbyvillians give for dropping out is boredom or frustration with the system. Our readings the past couple of summers have taught us, if nothing else, that the system we have inherited was designed to produce a tolerance for boredom and frustration. Some students react poorly to the innoculation.
To use a tangentially related example, I can't run on a treadmill. I get bored. The problem, however, isn't the boredom. It's the fact that at the moment of boredom, I go into some pretty elaborate day dreams and, quite frankly, misstep on the machine and do damage to my limbs and torso. To keep my heart functioning, I have to be a bit more creative. (Or get Seneca on cd and listen to that.)
Boredom, therefore, isn't bad. It's what we do with the boredom that matters. My children occasionally complain to me that they are bored. I say, "congratulations!" Why? That proves the mind is active. I also say, "what can you do about it?" The options are seemingly endless--and the best of us find some way around that. Some adolescents, though, with limited ability to abstract beyond the current predicament, to see a future self even when just such a self is staring at them across the breakfast table, react only with anger and an "I'm outta here" attitude.
The fact is, we NEED some way around the institutionalized boredom, some way to tap into this energy which, traditionally, is being stomped on rather than channeled into something productive. In the 1950's, we didn't need all that creativity (it would seem) and the education system grew up to produce factory workers. Now, even factory workers need academic skills and creativity.
I apologize for the long post, but the article really struck me-particularly the elementary school principal who busies himself spotting at risk first graders. I wondered how he did it. I wondered what he looked for. I wondered if he would have seen ME as an at risk first grader and if, had I been so labelled, my life would have been different.
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