>School Daze

My new co-op preschool, while small, is a big success. Only two weeks in, I’m seeing the other children open up more than they ever did in playgroup, answering questions, volunteering explanations and wholeheartedly participating in the activities we’ve planned for them.

Punky now wants to play “preschool” every morning, alternating between the roles of student and teacher. It is awe-inspiring to watch her little mind soak up new information so easily- and when she eagerly asks to learn more, I feel, for the first time, like I’m really doing work of great importance.

This experience is countered, though, by the tales of my 14-year-old’s first days of high school, where she claims she has never been more bored in her life, where she “sleeps through Algebra” (but has a 102 average, so I can’t complain), and where it sounds like she’s being lectured in every class by teachers bored out of their minds by the very subjects they’re teaching.

“I guess they’re just trying to prepare us for what college is going to be like,” she told me dismally. “Lecturing and notes.”

“No,” I told her. “No, no, no, no, no. They may tell you that’s what college is like? But they’re wrong.”

“I mean, you’ll have a few classes like that in the beginning, in a big room with two or three hundred people,” I qualified. “But then the classes will get smaller and you’ll start learning from professors instead of graduate assistants and some of those professors will change your life. They’ll be passionate about that subject and excited and they will make learning seem wonderful.“

I’m prickling with frustration right now that neither of my girls have had many teachers who seem to love their work. With a few notable exceptions, the majority of their teachers have done absolutely nothing to inspire in them a love for learning. Instead, there have been so many disappointments, like the teacher who spent class time surfing the web for eBay deals, the one who talked incessantly on her cell phone during class, the one who never taught a thing about her subject, but instead spent every single class period chatting with her students, and the one who assigned my stepdaughter hours of homework a night, but was herself so disorganized that she routinely lost papers and gave her zeroes on work that she had in fact turned in. Aaargh!

I don’t blame my school district in particular; I don’t even blame public schools in particular, since I went for years to a private school and had the very same experience. Instead, I suspect that bureaucracy and standards are sucking the joy out of the profession for many teachers. And I think that others have been in the profession so long, they’ve lost all excitement for the subjects they teach, and simply follow the same worn teaching plan year after year after year.

This is on my mind now because n less than two years, Punky will start school. She’ll attend the best elementary school in our district, so I wouldn’t dream of holding her out, but after that, I worry. I don’t want to see that spark of interest die in her eyes in the face of hours of useless homework. I don’t want to hear more stories of teachers who don’t care. I don’t want her to think that learning is anything less than a joy.

But how do I keep this from happening?

This post originally appeared on Parents.com.