When Academic Education Doesn’t Feel Right Anymore: What Parents and Teachers Can Do
Last Tuesday, my eleven-year-old son, Eli, sat at the kitchen table with a social studies packet, a granola bar, and a pencil he kept flipping onto the floor. He had to label a map of the Erie Canal and answer six short-response questions. The dishwasher hummed. Our dog barked at nothing. Eli kicked the chair leg and said, “I don’t get why I have to memorize this. I don’t care about the Erie Canal.”
I’m a middle school teacher, so I usually have a ready answer. “It’s part of the curriculum.” “You’ll need it for the test.” “Just get it done.” But that night I didn’t say any of those things. Earlier that day, my eighth graders had asked me six times whether an assignment was graded. A girl who writes fantasy stories in a hidden notebook asked if she could “just do the worksheet” instead of the project, because the project had too many choices. Another boy stared at his Chromebook for twenty minutes and then wrote, “I don’t know what you want me to do.”
Academic education doesn’t feel right anymore. Not because school is bad. Not because teachers are lazy. Most teachers I know are running on fumes and granola. It’s because the machine we’re all inside—the tests, the packets, the grade portals, the pacing guides—seems to be eating something we used
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