Summa Skool...

Having an eight-year old boy who sees school as nothing more than time to socialize with other kids is challenging, to say the least. Having an eight-year old boy who is stubborn as hell and sees no reason why he has to come up with three ways to get to an answer, regardless of what the teacher tells him he has to do, leads to a battle every night when it's homework time.

Let's just say that my son is not a fan of education today. Neither is his mother. After spending a day out and about and having to deal with many charming and ever so polite teenagers at cash registers and restaurants, I'm convinced that these kids are way dumber than even the slowest kids I graduated with way back in the day when you memorized your facts and only had to get the fucking answer right. Nobody asked how you know the right answer, unless you were suspected of cheating, because what's the point.

"Showing your work" and explaining in a sentence how you know that 4 + 4 = 8 has turned these teens into idiot zombies who cannot do simple math or carry on a very basic conversation. When I'm in the checkout line or the customer service line, the only thing that matters to me is that you come up with the right answer as quickly as possible. I couldn't give a fuck how you get there, and I surely don't want to hear your "logic." The kicker was the college student waitress who admitted after watching me finesse my John Hancock on a receipt after three delicious margaritas, mind you, that she has no idea how to sign her name unless she prints it.

So, why am I spending my summer trying to teach the boy cursive writing before he starts third grade and is expected to pick it up in the three months they spend teaching it so that he can use it to do his work exclusively in fourth grade, only to be told in fifth that he can print again, because everything becomes about the computer? Um, because my friends with older kids told me to, just like they told me that I was supposed to teach the boy his math facts, because they don't do that anymore in school. Unfortunately, they told me too late, so we spent our summers having fun instead of learning what he will never learn in school. Seems like a letter home at the end of each school year, detailing what they will be expected to have learned at home or by osmosis would be a good idea.

Of course, that would be too much to expect from our school system, you know, because they're too busy overthinking every speck of minutia because the test they're teaching to requires overthinking everything to death, and we can't have low test scores in MA, after all. The funny thing about that is since the schools began the whole new math and nothing can be correct unless you write an essay to explain why you know the answer, I've noticed that many kids that are graduating are not all that smart. Maybe their minds went to mush, as mine would have, if you made me learn that way or maybe it's a flawed idea from the get-go, because some kids just can't learn that way and aren't so great at writing a paragraph in answer to a simple yes or no question.

I was an A student, honor roll most of the time, but I'd probably flunk right out of high school with this sort of teaching. My brain doesn't work that way. I was and always will be a memorizer. What's wrong with that? The answer is the answer is the answer, unless you're an engineer or a scientist, and in my job I've witnessed how hard it is for some of them to think their way out of a cardboard box. Simple common sense gets lost when you overanalyze too much.

Old math worked just fine, people. I mean, we managed to get men on the moon and build incredible bridges and buildings way back when it was okay to carry the one when adding, and even though I hump my calculator 99.9% of the time, I can still write out a good, old-fashioned math problem if need be and come up with the correct answer. Oh, and I can do my times tables up to twelvesies and short division in my head. You'll get no explanation out of me as to how I came up with the answer beyond the obvious, "I memorized them in fourth grade," and I won't show you three other ways to get there, but I guarantee I'll get there faster than most of these poor kids today.

Sure, some kids can handle this way of teaching and thrive, so you parents of math geeks and critical thinkers need not tell me just how wrong and stupid I am. You happy-go-lucky overthinkers just keep on keepin' on. I mean you no harm. I'm just a mother of a kid who could have such a better experience with his school years if there wasn't this one size fits all, every brain must work the same way mentality in public schools today. In my day, there were general classes, and there were AP classes for just this reason, and the system worked much better. We all got a decent education that way, and some of the most successful people I know were in the general classes.

Will I throw in the towel and all of our savings to send the boy to a private school some day? Maybe. Will I say "fuck that," save my money and homeschool him? Highly unlikely, since I value my sanity and don't want to become a pill addict, but if his spirit keeps getting crushed by attending school, I'll swallow a handful of pills each day and gives him a fine edumication. That will be the last step, however, because we're simply not meant to be together all day, every day. We're too much alike.

For now, though, we're spending a little time each day at Lola's Summa Skool doing workbook pages designed to get him ready for third grade, and he's seeing his reading tutor weekly, in hopes that we can get a jump-start this year and avoid the shitty report cards and dire warnings of years past that he's not meeting grade standard. He's not happy about it, and neither am I, since it's becoming pretty obvious that my math skills are not up to third grade level.

I swear, if I have to watch the poor kid draw another number line to plot out the answer to 60 - 25, my head might explode, and I'm trying desperately to bite my pencil and not teach the kid to carry the one so he can do simple fucking math in a timely manner. It's KILLING ME, but we wouldn't want him to be suspended over using outdated math practices, now would we?