Fed Up With the Education System? What One Parent Does To Support Their Kid At Home
Last Tuesday, I waited for my 7th grader Lila by the middle school bike rack, rain seeping through the cuffs of my jacket, when she stomped over, crumpled quiz held tight in one fist. Her bike had a flat, and she’d already gotten a warning for being late to lunch once that week. “I got a 62 on this,” she said, shoving the paper at me. A Cheeto stain blotted the bottom corner.
The quiz was for a short story about a teen who plants a community garden after her mom loses her job. The last question, worth 20 points, asked for the main theme. Lila’s answer: “Hard work doesn’t always turn out how you plan, but you still get good tomatoes out of it.” The teacher marked it wrong. The only accepted correct answer: “The importance of patience.” Lila has to retake it at lunch, she told me, and she already knows she just has to write the other answer to get the point. But it still bugged her enough to carry that crumpled paper all the way out to the bike rack. Standing there, holding her too-small spare raincoat I keep in the car, that’s when I admitted to myself how fed up I really am. I’d been annoyed by small rigid rules for years, but this was the moment it clicked: the system isn’t just inconvenient sometimes. It’s stupid, when it marks a thoughtful, specific answer wrong just because it doesn’t match a pre-written key.
I knew it wouldn’t help to blame Lila’s teacher, though. A few months before that quiz, Lila turned in a bee project for social studies that drove that home. She’d gotten obsessed with native mason bees after watching a YouTube video, spent three weekends building a small hive box out of scrap wood from my dad’s workshop, counted how many bees visited our clover patch every morning, and kept a 12-page journal of when they hatched and what flowers they preferred. The assignment was a “community impact project,” and the district required a 5-slide Google Slides presentation with specific mandatory headings. Lila turned in her journal and the hive box instead. She got a C- because it didn’t follow the format. I emailed the teacher, and she wrote back that she thought the project was fantastic, but she had 30 kids to grade, and the department set the rubric. If she bent the rules for Lila, she’d have to bend them for everyone, and she didn’t have time. I get it. The stupid isn’t coming from teachers. It’s built into a system that has to sort and grade hundreds of kids as fast as possible, with too little staff and too many top-down rules.
I don’t have the money to pull Lila out for private school, and I work full time so homeschool isn’t an option. All I can do is small, low-effort things at home to keep her from thinking her ideas are less valuable than a checkmark on a quiz.
We started what we call “good answer night” once a week, it’s only 20 minutes after homework on Wednesdays. Any assignment or question that got marked down for a stupid reason, we pull it out. Lila writes her original answer or idea on an index card, and we tape it to our fridge, right next to the grocery list and the soccer schedule. The tomato answer was the first one we put up. It’s not a big protest, it’s just a small way to remind her that her thought matters more than what the pre-written key says it should be.
We also split big projects into two versions: the school version and the real version. If the school requires a specific format that kills the point of what Lila wants to do, she cranks out the school version in 20 minutes, hits all the required bullet points and headings, checks every box to get a passing grade. Then we do the real version on our own time, no rules. For the bee project, she banged out the 5-slide Google Slides in 20 minutes, just copied bullet points from her journal, turned it in, and that was that for school. Then we set up her hive box in the back yard, invited my parents over, she gave a 10-minute talk about what she learned, and we had ice cream after. It doesn’t add hours of work to our week, and it lets her keep doing the work she cares about without tanking her grades.
I also use the same line every time she gets upset about a bad grade for a dumb reason: “The system is built to grade a lot of kids quickly, not to notice every good idea. That’s not your fault, and that doesn’t mean your idea is bad.” I don’t rant about how terrible school is, because she still has to go there every day. I just frame it as a broken tool, not a judgment of her.
It’s not perfect. Last month, her report card came, and that C- from the bee project brought her overall social studies grade down to a B. She wants to join the advanced environmental science club next year, and you need an A average in social studies to get in. I emailed the counselor, asked if they could make an exception, and she said no, the rules are set by the district. So that’s that. It still sucks. I’m still fed up. Some days I want to march into the administration office and dump all our index cards on the principal’s desk. But I can’t change the whole system right now.
Last weekend, we planted tomato seedlings in our backyard. Lila dug the holes, dropped in the plants, and said, “I bet if that quiz writer came here, they’d still say the main theme of gardening is patience.” I laughed, and she wiped dirt off her jeans. We went inside for lemonade after. Her index card is still on the fridge, right where we can see it every morning when we get the cereal out. That’s enough, for now.
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