As a worldly fourth grader, Mark now recites the expected response to the same question asked by countless grownups, “Yes! No more school!” What’s going on here? Virtually all adults, including relatives, parents of his friends and socially correct neighbors who contribute to the school walkathon, are implying that the best part of school is being done with it. True, they’re only making small talk. But that chitchat is powerful. Not once has someone asked Mark if he’s glad Little League is almost over. All spring they’ve said with enthusiasm, “I remember when I (or my brother) played baseball. Boy, was that fun. What position do you play? How is your hitting What’s your team’s name?” Mark gets the message over and over that Little League is something worth discussing.
And the place where he spends six hours a day? Once in a while it rates a vague, “How’s school?” Mark groans about hating spelling and the adult commiserates, “Yeah, I hated it too.” End of conversation. But what if the grown-ups asked, “What books are you reading? I used to read the Hardy Boys under the covers at night.” Or, “Have you learned about the Gold Rush yet? I loved history.”
Too dorky, right? Who will admit to liking school? We identify with daydreaming Calvin, the elementary-school kid from the comics, engaged in intergalactic warfare with his teacher, not Calvin’s nemesis, Susie, who pays attention and does her homework.
We can talk all we want about the importance of an education, but when we act as though school is a holding tank rather than a launching pad, kids pick up the undercurrent. They won’t believe the dancing penguins in the TV public-service announcement that say, “Be cool. Stay in school” when grown-ups are still chanting “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.”
I’m not saying that teachers don’t give dirty looks anymore or that some parts of school aren’t difficult or boring. But on the whole, the early school years are exciting. Learning to write your name, count, cut with scissors, tell time and read are important milestones-inductions into the grownup world. Teachers have so many new teaching methods now. Kids learn about numbers by estimating how many seeds will be in a watermelon, or graphing how many kids believe in ghosts. They bury and unearth garbage to study ecology. It’s not fair to color a new generation’s perception of school with our memories of flash cards or Algebra II. Since we’ve delegated sex education and drug prevention to the schools, along with reading, writing and math, the least we can do is provide some reinforcement and enthusiasm for the subject matter. If later school years aren’t so exciting, we should be working to make them more interesting, not trashing current teachers’ efforts.
Yes, mastering multiplication is hard. So is learning to swing a bat level. Throughout a lifetime it’s handier to know that 6 times 8 is 48 than to know you should keep your elbows up before the pitch. We don’t need to pretend that school is fun, fun, fun, but we do need to convince kids that the work of school is worthwhile. Ten-year-olds can’t afford our living-for-the-weekend mentality when they’ll be competing for jobs with eager students from around the world in just a few years. We keep saying our schools need reforming; think what reforming our attitude about school would accomplish.
The amount of time kids, parents and coaches devote to Little League is mind-boggling. The other night four managers of Little League Majors teams scouted Mark’s ball game. The kids swung harder and hustled faster under the scrutiny. The parents buzzed at the prospect that one of their sons might advance to the Majors. What if academic pursuits received that kind of attention? What if four adults scouted the fourth grade for top-notch trumpet players or sought promising writers from the fifth-grade essay assignment or surveyed the elementary school science fair for up-and-coming talent? As the saying goes, “Children will walk where we walk, not where we point.”
Part of the adult preoccupation with sports and vacation is envy. While we are working our buns off we lust over all that free time. Oh, those were the days, when we hit home runs or just lay in the sun. We forget the hours sitting on the bench or bugging our parents because there was nothing to do.
Best things:I like summer, but the best things in my life happened during the school year. I remember pestering my mother to read to me one afternoon when I was in first grade. “You can read to yourself,” she said. “I only know how to read the books at school,” I protested. “Go find a book and see,” she said. So I stomped upstairs and picked a thick orange book that had been my mother’s when she was a girl. The first page was one long paragraph. I read the first word and the next and the next, a whole page of words that started a story. The magic was exhilarating. “I can read real books, I shouted, waving “Maida’s Little House.”
As you might guess, I met my husband, not at Yankee Stadium, but in college. We started talking while drinking beer at the student union. And that’s part of the point. School is not just book learning; it’s recess and being Peter Rabbit in the class play. For some kids it’s breakfast and lunch and a place to learn English.
Mark’s younger brother, David, says he can’t wait for the first grade to be over. He’s learned the cool response from Mark. But I know he’s looking forward to learning “hard math” and reading long books in second grade. Please encourage him.
