Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

School day

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Simon is home with me two days a week: Mondays and Thursdays. I made Thursday my volunteer-at-Sophia’s-kindergarten day — give Simon exposure to kindergarten, let him play a little with the big kids, give me something to do during the day when I have him. (Yes. I am selfish enough to keep the days when both of them are in school for myself.)

What do I do when I volunteer? Mostly, clerical stuff. Marvin the Robot Voice: Brain the size of a planet, and I do photocopying. I photocopy pictures for class projects. I collate papers for the students’ files. I stick handouts into the students’ bookbags. I cut out poems for projects with scrapbooking scissors that have various edges — today was the “Sunflower” design. I couldn’t cut with a scissors to make an interesting design when I was in school and I haven’t gotten any better at it in the meantime.

Meanwhile, Simon is either on the K playground, which he has to himself until recess, or near me playing with the boxes of blocks they keep in the manipulatives section (used for counting and sorting in math). He also enjoys, on the nicer, warmer days, sitting at one of the “big kids” tables and eating his lunch. He likes paging through the books in the classroom’s library. His favorite is the I Spy books, and he insists I read one to him, which I do before we leave.

One of the things I love about doing the work is spending a little time watching Sophia’s class in session. Watching how the kids and teacher interact. Watching how Sophia behaves — she usually forgets I’m there after a while. Whenever the teacher asks a question, whether about the book he’s reading, or about doing the calendar, or math, Sophia raises her hand to answer. Sometimes she gets so excited she just blurts out the answer. It’s interesting watching the way she behaves — which I have generalized in my mind to “the way all five-year-olds behave” — with the way her peers do. The differences, the similarities. One of the things the teacher has said is great about Sophia is how verbal she is, talking to everyone, articulating her ideas.

I only stay there an hour, which means I don’t get terribly much done. (Less, if the photocopier is acting up, the way it was one week.) But Simon starts to go stir-crazy after an hour, whether from lack of running around screaming or from hunger or from simple tiredness.

There are still times I wish I could home-school. But I don’t have the temperament for it, at least not right now. I don’t doubt that I could do it, but currently this school is working well for us, and more importantly, for Sophia. And I like being a small, hour-long part of it every week.

The start of school

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Her Highness the Most Excellent Sophia started Kindergarten yesterday. Somebody tell me how a baby I just brought home from the hospital can possibly be starting Kindergarten?

I looked at the list of stuff she’s supposed to know for Kindergarten. She was well past that level about 2 years ago. I looked at the list of the stuff she’s supposed to learn this year and, well, let’s see…she does not in fact know how to tell time on an analog clock yet. So we have that to look forward to.

We walk to school in the late morning. (I signed her up for the “afternoon” kindergarten because I don’t want to have to have her out the door by 7:45am any earlier than I have to, which turns out to be 1st grade.) So far she’s not pleased at the walk—”Mommy, I get tired!” It’s 6/10 of a mile each way. I think she’ll adapt. Also, extra exercise for me.

She’s been very excited about the whole Kindergarten thing for weeks, if not months. Now that it’s started she’s a little unsure about the whole thing—while we’ve run into preschool friends at the school, none of them are in her class. She’s outgoing, though: I don’t sense that she’ll have much trouble making friends. Which, let’s face it, is what this is all about, as far as I’m concerned.

(Pssst: Can someone please tell me how to put some space between the picture up there and the text next to it? I’ve been playing with the style sheets and html for 30 minutes now and seeing no improvement. Just a little space from the text, that’s all I want!)

Orcinus on NCLB

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David Neiwert has an excellent entry on No Child Left Behind, the crown jewel of Bush’s domestic program—and if that doesn’t tell you what kind of shape Bush’s domestic program is in, nothing will.

What little discussion there has been of these remarks has focused, perhaps rightly, on how out of touch they make Bush appear when it comes to the lives of working people. A 55-year-old worker isn’t interested in going back to school to learn a new skill so he can start up another career. He just wants his job back. Bush’s remarks reflect someone who sees workers and jobs as portable commodities, and has no sense whatsoever of the pain inflicted by policies that eviscerate the nation’s manufacturing capacity.

But even more telling, I think, are what these remarks say about Bush’s view of education.

To people like Bush, the value of education lies solely in its ability to provide a steady supply of workers. Education isn’t a matter of improving our lives, making us better citizens capable of thinking for themselves, inspiring us to reach the maximum of our human capacities; it’s a union card, a system designed to churn out as many trained workers as possible.

This view of education, in fact, is pronounced among conservatives in general. And it’s directly reflected in Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program.

Consider, if you will, the areas of accomplishment that are tested under NCLB: reading, math, science, and English. All of these areas are those which are viewed by business interests as those most essential to training a viable workforce. All other areas of education — particularly the arts, civics, history, geography, and social studies — are relegated to minor status.

Now, it’s unquestionable that one of the important functions of education is indeed to prepare young citizens for entry into the workforce, and to provide them the tools to be fully capable participants in the economy. But that isn’t its sole purpose, either.

Education is supposed to make better citizens of us by giving us the tools to understand how our world works. It is, above all, supposed to help us to find our own special gifts and enable them, making our society both more creative and inventive and making us more fulfilled individually.

NCLB not only ignores those aspects of education, but by giving work-related skills primacy, it crowds them out, sometimes altogether.