When I went to school it was an ordeal. I had three older sisters who seemed to love school and talked about it all the time, so naturally I was excited when my first day of school was approaching. Being the youngest of four girls I was often the recipient of old and worn out hand me down clothing and it was always rare and a treat to get something new that was mine and only mine. On one particular sunny day in August of 1972 my mother took me shopping at the Sears in downtown Wheeling WV. I could not be more excited I got three new dresses and some new t-shirts and pants. One of the dresses was a Winnie The Pooh dress with Tigger and Pooh and Piglet and all the other characters from the Pooh stories. I loved Winnie the Pooh and this was my favorite dress and incidentally the dress I wore on my very first day of school.
I don't remember what happened that day but it must have been pretty bad because upon returning home from school I ran to my room and took all my new clothes and threw them out the back door and announced that I would not be returning to that school. Of course that was not to be the case. I was sent the next day and the next and so on througout the next twelve tumultuous years of my public school education. I hated school so much that every Sunday night I would get a stomach ache just thinking about the next day. A new week of hell. I was not the student my two older "honor roll" sisters were. I did not grasp concepts very well and I was often behind in most everything until second grade when my reading finally caught up to the rest of the class. Unfortunately I never caught up in math and I was always in remedial math classes. I was one of the youngest in my class. My birthday was in October and at the time of my enrollment in school, I believe the cut off date was the end of November. I would have been much better off had I waited one more year.
After high school I floudered around for a while and didn't quite know what to do. I moved to Boston in 1988 and I worked for Tufts New England Medical School. The hospital had a program for advancement in education and would pay for any classes from any of the schools in Boston. I went to Boston University and frankly I was not sure how I would do because of my previous experience with public education. I did surprisingly well in college and attribute this to maturity and the fact that I would not be reimbursed for my classes unless I passed them. But I did not only pass them I kept a GPA that was a 3.4 which is more than just passing but doing very well by college standard. Unfortunately I never finished school and have regretted it to this very day. I did enjoy college a great deal and would love to return to BU at any time to finish what I had started.
What all of this tells me is that Public School is wrong and it needs to change and in a big way. Both of my children are now enrolled in Public School and it seems as if not much has changed. It is still a sit down shut up and listen kind of atmosphere that does not jive with the child at all. Children require movement and involvement to learn and to be educated. They are whole body learning machines. They incorporate as many senses as they can into the learning experience and this starts as early as infancy. Just watch a baby crawl and inspect everything in their environment. They use their hands, their eyes and their mouths. The more senses sending information the better. The better the learning experience. How can one know what it is like to understand any part of our world without having had the whole body experience in their education? Ask yourself how you learned what you know and think about what senses you incorporated in learning that lesson or task. Did you use only your eyes or only your ears which is what children are expected to do? Or did you touch and smell or even taste? Did you move a certain way did you feel what it is like to do your job? You cannot learn any job without doing it first. You cannot learn only from a book, though this is a good place to start it is not the only tool available and it is a shame that more tools are not made available to children in the public school setting. They try to incorporate technology and have "projects" but for the most part they are made to sit and listen. This is not effective for most people. Public school is designed to teach the academic child and that child is the only one who will excel in that environment. I remember sitting in my first grade class staring out the window longingly wishing I could just go outside and run. My teachers called me a day dreamer and I guess that is what I was because they certainly did not have the talent to get my attention. Teachers are trained to teach the child how to behave and not how to learn. Teachers spend a great deal of time in discipline and very little time actually teaching. It is very distressing that this is still the case 25 years after leaving public school. My oldest son hates school just as much as I did and I am very very disappointed because now I love to learn and I spend most of my days in search of information and an opportunity to learn more. I wish I would have had a teacher who could have inspired that in me. I believe I had the desire to learn beaten out of me by Marshall County Schools and it took going to Boston University to rekindle my natural learning instincts. I thank you BU and I am sorry for you Marshall County Schools. I have often considered bringing some type of suite against this poor misguided school district but to what end? I would not be able to get back what was taken from me nor would it serve any purpose other than to aggravate the sleeping giant that public shool has become.
