F* THE WORLD

Driving home from school today, I waited at an interminable red light tapping my fingers and half-listening to Scott Simon interviewing some expert about some new type of robot-armed eco soda machine of the future. Blah blah blah blah. I knew it was important, something about fluorocarbons and the ozone layer and blah blah blah blah.  It was too much detail, and I was pissed and this light was taking forever and I didn’t really care about soda machine fluorocarbons, dammit, and and was I ever going to get home.

A cholo on his banana bike meandered across my line of sight.  He was wearing the usual dark baggy shorts, pulled-up white socks, and a white t-shirt.  The t was decorated with messages and signatures, the most prominent of which read, in 3-inch letters, ‘F* THE WORLD’.  I glanced from the letters to his face which also basically said F* THE WORLD.  He must have been in his late teens.  Kid clothing and a kid bike and an adult’s body.  Half in two worlds.

I looked at that cholo and thought about my 5th graders.  He was one of their possible futures.

I’ve been struggling these past ten days with the vast range of knowledge of the 34 kids in my classroom.  From kids who read 235 words per minute and devour Reptiles of the Southwest for fun to kids who really are more at home with Dr. Seuss, the early years.  Kids who can write me eight paragraphs including a proper usage of ‘exhuberance’ to kids who struggle with forming two coherent sentences. And then there’s my newcomer from Egypt who knows about thirty words of English.

The range in Math is vastly broader.  Montanan almost.  Wide and open.  Seemingly unbridgeable.

My daily challenge is to find the desks and minutes to work with the 34 in smaller groups that narrow the range so that I can help them try to bridge it without–and this is so important–losing either the lowest or highest ends.

Meanwhile the district keeps hurling dodgeballs my way.  Here’s a new math program with twelve cd-roms to try out.  Here’s a new health book the kids should work with.  Here’s a new arts program that semi-duplicates the one we already have.  Here’s a new inspection coming through this morning.  Here are logs that you have to sign off on every morning after letting the water run so that the yellow stuff gets flushed from the pipes.  Here’s a new version of a test that 14 of the kids should take, part of it one-on-one.  Here’s a new assembly.  Chorus tryouts.  Smartboard.  Tech lab.  New computers.  Blah blah blah blah.

STOP!  I want to shout.  F* THE WORLD.  Just let me have a little time and space to integrate things, find a way to make it all work.  Get the big picture before I stick endless pieces in.

It’s like doing a 1,000 piece puzzle without having seen the picture on the box.  Come on, you gotta know how all the pieces will eventually fit together.

Sitting at that red light watching the anger seep out of that boy-man, I understood one part of where the system had failed him.  We’re so busy with the piecemeal, we don’t offer the kids the big picture. We barely have ten seconds to try to grasp it for ourselves.

We can’t just hurl detail upon detail at these kids.

They need to know:  Why do they need to know all these things?  How do the years fit together?  How does what I’m teaching them now build on what they learned last year and the year before that.  How will it lead to next year?

Sometimes we’re like the bad parents we never wanted to be.  Our daily lives are just one crisis or latest fad or brief pleasure after another.  And we make learning this way for the children.  Pieces.  Unconnected.

No wonder we all ride around in anger.