I Don't Want to Send My Kids to Public School Because I Used to Teach at One

It's really bad.

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I’ll be honest, re-reading this piece filled me with some dread. I’m running out of time to make my FINAL decision about homeschooling my kids. Right now my *tentative* plan is to homeschool both children next year (eeek) and my thoughts about that vacillate between terrified and excited almost every week.

No more early morning driving! Less days lost to TV because were all sick (maybe)!!

More time spent connecting with my children and encouraging their own unique interests!

But then a cynical voice creeps in, scolding me: “you can’t even get your daughter to brush her teeth properly, how will you get her to do a book report??”

In the end, I feel as though I owe it to myself to at least give it my best shot. Mainly for the reasons listed below.

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“You’re a fucking cunt!” were the words that burst out of an 8th-grader as she threw a chair across the classroom. My eyes darted around the room to thirty kids either laughing or unfazed. This particular student had attempted suicide twice, was rumored to have Tourette’s, and was one of those students whom others cleared a path for when she walked down the hallway.

“Go to the office,” was really the only thing I could say. Everyone knew that this lame attempt at ‘discipline’ would result in absolutely nothing. She knew it too. No one at “the office” had the skills or resources to help this student who was in a complete crisis.

When I imagined myself as a teacher, this is not what I had in mind.

The problem with schools, not just public schools, is that they are a microcosm of all of society’s problems. When parents are overwhelmed, absent, and consumed with survival; they’re not too worried when Dustin hasn’t turned in an assignment in 4 weeks. Try teaching The Cask of Amontillado to a kid who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from is in policy terms, ‘suboptimal’.

While private schools may price out the families suffering on the margins, they’re awash in the same problems that plague the higher-income bracket: dismal mental health, bullying, immense pressure from their parents to get a worthy return on their investment, and so on.

The problem with teaching is that, like a majority of teachers recently polled, I spent most of my day not teaching. While I loved pouring myself into creating engaging curriculum, I only spent about 30% of my day actually teaching it. The bulk of it was split between grading papers, straight up killing time and “classroom management.”

And I was horrible at classroom management.

I went with an authoritarian approach because that’s all I knew. I thought strict rules and clear consequences were the best way to get to good behavior (aka compliance) in the classroom. My thinking was if I started out the year as a strict, no bullshit teacher that didn’t let them get away with anything, they’d know not to act out, and I’d have no problems.

This is the same sort of thinking that is in line with behaviorist parenting and belief that we can control other humans using stimulus and response. When in reality, the most effective way to teach and educate is to form relationships, whether it be with your students or your children. When you don’t have that leverage of a relationship, you’re completely powerless.

You'd be surprised just how fast you can get through the meaningful material, and then it's all just filler time.

There are huge chunks of time that go by in the school day without meaningful instruction. Nobody plans it like that, but it just happens. The first and last five minutes of every 50-minute class are shaved down by trying to get 20+ eleven-year-olds to settle in, hold still, and focus. Then there are study halls, homerooms, half days, substitute teachers, and so on.

I would feel intense dread ahead of certain class periods that, although weren't tied to any grade or requirement for kids, I had to somehow motivate and think of creative enrichment activities.

Most other teachers just gave them a "study period," which amounted to kids playing games on their school-issued iPads despite having a string of zeros in my grade book.

The way we educate children in this country turns them into passive learners. By the time they reach middle school, they've become accustomed to being told what to do. And when they're not given explicit instruction to do something, they will do absolutely nothing. You can call it laziness, unrealistic expectations, resentment, compliance, whatever; it's not learning.

 I remember one sweet but difficult student who, despite being in 8th grade, could barely write a few sentences. He couldn’t get through three minutes of instruction without yelling out some random comment about his grandpa or what he ate or dinner last night. 

This little boy had unmedicated ADHD, and while I sympathized with his parents' decision to keep him off meds, I couldn't deny the disruption it caused in my class. It's this type of dynamic that prompts teachers to advocate for psych evaluations and medications to parents and administrators, so they can just get through a lesson.

I worked with him one-on-one for many hours in remedial classes. Every sentence he wrote was a triumph. In our IEP meetings with his parents, I tried to convince them and the principal to hold him back another year in eighth grade so he would have a chance to catch up to his peers.

In no way was this kid ready to go to high school.

We used to call this “holding a student back” or “repeating a grade.” It’s now called “grade retention". Some of the data says that this intervention can be effective for kids in third grade and under. Some other data says it’s bad for kids because it prompts too much social humiliation to justify the meager academic gains. So now, thanks to "No Child Left Behind," the education reform legislation passed in the early 2000s, it's illegal to keep a child back if they are only failing one class. Even if that class is reading and writing. The result? Kids can get "socially promoted" to the next grade, over and over, until they graduate and are shuttled out in the real world with minimal literacy.

These are the systemic, one-size-fits-all problems with public education that can't be denied. Kids being medicated, their personalities are pathologized in the name of having their behavior fit into a cookie-cutter idea of what a classroom is supposed to look like. And on the opposite end, there are brilliant students who would benefit from more complex instruction, rolling their eyes and just going through the motions of being a "good student" without ever actually being challenged. Then there are kids in the middle who have figured out how to do the minimum required of them and remain aloof. Everyone loses.

Teachers talk shit about parents, they judge, they blame. We’d describe parents as “enabling” their kids shitty behavior. I participated in this before I became a parent myself. 

And the parents would condemn teachers as being lazy or picking on their kid. 

I’d  fume about it. I wanted to scream, “I’m powerless in this classroom!  I’m trying my best to make a difference and inspire your kid to have a love for learning. But I’m stuck under the rubble of behavioral problems and I have to spend hours teaching to a statewide standardized test which is directly tied to my performance review so when you show up complaining that the book we’re reading in class says, ‘FUCK’ in it, I’m read to throw myself out of a window!!!”

I didn’t realize we’re all just fighting an impossible battle and posing as adversaries when really it’s that we’re all fighting against all the problems in America that are playing in overcrowded and underfunded classrooms.

I have two kids, my daughter is school aged and I LOVE her small Montessori school. It’s in a one room church schoolhouse, for crying out loud! There are only 22 students, and they are highly focused on independent, individualized learning. There isn’t really a lot of whole class instruction that you think of when you think of school. 

For now she’s shielded from the corrosive elements of organized schooling in her little bubble. But the school only goes up to sixth grade. 

What do I do after that? Do we homeschool? What if she resents me for not letting her be “normal”? Is she missing out? Won’t being thrown into public school at such a vulnerable time spell disaster? 

What some people suggest is putting her in public school SOONER so that she doesn’t have a shock to the system in such a traditionally difficult transitional time. However that’s the exact fucking opposite of what I want. 

For now I’m tabling the issue since it’s pretty far off. Perhaps the school will expand by then. Maybe she’ll be cool with the idea of homeschooling after 6th grade. Or maybe we’ll decide as a family to try public school.

I wonder if the stress and confusion this subject brings me is connected to my unwillingness to let go of my children—which admittedly isn’t always the best thing. So I’m open to the possibility that I could change my mind but what I saw when I was a teacher and continue to hear about from teacher friends doesn’t give me much hope.

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