What the current state of education looks like for kids: A 4th grade teacher and parent’s honest take
Last Tuesday, I was stacking crumpled construction paper and picking up half-erased pencils after dismissal when I spotted Mia’s neon pink water bottle tucked under her desk. I reached for it, knocked over her open homework folder, and a crumpled slip of notebook paper fluttered to my feet. It said, in wobbly 9-year-old handwriting: “I hate that I have to stop drawing my dinosaur to finish math. If I get a bad grade I can’t go to my cousin’s birthday camping trip this weekend.”
That night, I sat across from my own 7th grader, Javi, at the kitchen table while he stared at a page of 18 algebra problems. He sighed, clicked open his phone, and glanced up at me. “Can I just copy the answers? I need to study for my social studies quiz and finish 2 chapters of reading for my log, and it’s already 7:30.”
I’ve been teaching 4th grade for 11 years, and Javi’s question hit me the same way Mia’s note did: this is what the current state of education feels like, for kids and for the adults who work with them. We’re all just rushing to check the next box, and the part that’s supposed to matter – actually learning something that sticks, or creating something that matters to you – gets pushed further and further to the side.
After I found Mia’s note, I pulled her aside before class the next morning. I asked her to show me the dinosaur she’d been working on. She pulled it out slow, like she was afraid I’d tell her it was a waste of time, and spread it across my desk. It was a full-page T-Rex, with a whole fern habitat drawn in the margins, little footprints leading off the edge of the paper. She’d spent three afternoons on it, she said. I told her I’d rather she take an extra two days to finish her math worksheet than rush through it to get to her drawing, and that I wouldn’t mark it down for being late. Then I taped her dinosaur to the front bulletin board, right next to the kids’ published writing. She smiled so big her eyes crinkled, and I realized I couldn’t remember the last time she’d smiled that wide in class.
When I first started teaching, we had 10 minutes of free choice time at the end of every day, and art once a week, and music twice a week. Five years ago, our district cut art and music to add 30 minutes of ELA instruction every day, to boost test scores. After the pandemic, when everyone was talking about kids being “behind,” we added more test prep, more homework, more benchmark checks, to catch them up. I don’t blame administrators for this – test scores affect our school funding, and we all want kids to hit the basic skills they need. But the end result is that almost every unstructured, creative part of the school day has been cut, and kids are carrying more stress than I’ve ever seen it.
Last semester, I did a quick anonymous check-in with my class, asking what they worry about most at school. Nineteen out of 28 kids said worrying about bad grades, before anything else. Only three said they worried about not understanding the work. Most just worry that they won’t hit the line someone else drew for them, on the exact timeline someone else set.
I saw that with Javi’s science project last month. He spent three weeks testing how different amounts of light affect tomato plant growth, measuring every morning before school, taking notes on how tall each plant got. He got a B- because he forgot to double-space his bibliography, and he crumpled the whole thing up and shoved it in the back of his closet. He said it didn’t matter anyway, he just messed up the formatting.
The thing no one talks about when we discuss the state of education is that you don’t have to wait for the district to rewrite the curriculum or change the testing rules to make small changes for the kids in front of you. I started a “late bin” in my classroom three years ago, and I don’t penalize any assignment turned in up to a week late. I cut my homework load in half – instead of 20 practice problems, I assign 5, the ones that actually test whether a kid gets the skill, not 15 repeats just to fill time. Every Friday, I give my class 15 minutes of unstructured time, where they can work on anything that doesn’t feel like assigned school work: drawing, building with blocks, writing fan fiction, whatever. It’s not a lot, but it gives kids 15 minutes a week to remember that learning can be something you choose, not something that’s done to you.
For parents, the small things add up too. If your kid is overwhelmed with homework, write a quick note to the teacher saying they spent 45 minutes on it and couldn’t finish – I’ve never had a problem with that as a teacher, and most of my colleagues don’t either. Pick one night a week where you skip the non-essential homework, no guilt, and go get ice cream or play a board game instead. Instead of only putting A papers on the fridge, put the drawing, the half-finished project, the thing your kid worked hard on even if it didn’t get a great grade.
Last week, Mia turned in her math worksheet two days early, with a tiny dinosaur doodle in the corner of the answer sheet. Last weekend, Javi pulled his old tomato project out of the closet, and he’s redoing the bibliography to enter it in the school science fair next month. He said he doesn’t care if he wins, he just wants to see if adding more fertilizer will change the growth rate this time.
We still have to do our quarterly benchmark tests, we still have a full curriculum to cram into 180 days, and some days I leave school feeling just as rushed and stressed as the kids. The big changes take time, and I don’t know if they’ll come in my career. But right now, for Mia, for Javi, for the kids sitting in my classroom every day, the small shifts are enough for now.
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