Below Average

Recently I asked some students a hypothetical question -- garnered from a great resource entitled "Nonstandardized Quests: 500+ Writing Prompts That Matter" by David E. LeCount. Great book, full of challenging, thought provoking writing prompts. The question was: "If humans hibernated two months of the year, what two months would you choose?"

Their answers were surprisingly similar and not at all like mine: "The coldest two months of the year, thank you very much."

No, weather was of little concern. They would like to sleep away two months of school -- whatever two months have the least amount of vacation time.

This response struck me as unfortunate. After all, we require that, for fourteen years of their life, all children attend school -- five days a week, seven hours per day. Shouldn't school, therefor, bring them a certain amount of joy? What does it mean when they spend the majority of their earliest years engaging in activities that they dislike? That they find exhausting? That they find mind numbingly boring? What does it mean when they are forced to engage in academic activities that often cause them to feel disinterested, inept, inadequate, frustrated, and in the case of almost every one of the students in my continuation high school classroom -- STUPID.

I asked my students to explain further and they informed me that school is a way of breaking you in, so to speak. Life sucks, you work a job you hate, you co-mingle with people you can't stand, and then you go home at the end of the day and get ready to do it all over again. It's important to go to school, my students tell me, because it gets you prepared for how crappy the rest of your life is probably going to be. But childhood should be fun, I tell them. They disagree. Why get a kids hopes up? No, stick them in Kindergarten, that way the rest of life won't be such a let down.