The New Game

This fall The School of Keigley has a transfer student arriving.

And her name is Riley.

She’s spent the last two years attending a local private school and is now heading home for her junior year.

Which means,

I have to do something I have never done before.

Instruct a high school student.

Actually,

that’s not the truth.

I spent six years teaching high school students.

But most days that feels like another life.

And, anyway, I have never actually been in charge of all aspects of teaching a high school student.

So when a couple of women who lead a local homeschool co-op offered an evening class covering all the basics you need to know to move your high schooler along to graduation and then college, I signed up immediately.

Talk about Information Overload.

We were wading in it.

The class was incredibly informative, abundantly helpful and completely worthwhile.

I feel as if I have the knowledge in my hands (if not yet in my brain) of how to navigate these tricky waters in the next two years.

And one aspect of what I learned made me want to jump on a soapbox.

So here I am.

Let the soapbox time commence.

I jotted most of this down that evening at class, filling in the margins of my pages with notes and written sighs.

I learned about South Carolina’s bizarre-o grading system that morphs everyone’s grades into some fractional numbers game.

And how most of the effort in acquiring a certain satisfactory number has everything to do with government money for scholarships.

And it’s ridiculous.

Part of me is hostile to a system.

You can actually improve your almighty GPA by earning a lower grade in an Honors class than by earning a better grade in a college prep class.

And isn’t that silly?

Who cares?

And what does any of it mean?

Nothing.

Piles and piles of nothing.

Hoops like this,

they make me crazy.

They make me want to jump off the tracks.

Grow my own rabbits and make clothes from their hair with Maggie.

Guess what?

I don’t actually care if my children make an “A”.

An arbitrary letter assigned to a task.

I do care if they know the information.

If they lived it and breathed it and absorbed it into their very being.

I want them to care about the knowledge they amass.

I abhor the idea of working solely for the goal of pleasing a specific college.

Just as I loathe the idea of teaching to a single test.

I want to educate.

And you can call that idealistic.

I don’t mind.

Idealism is the air we breathe.

And it’s the air we’re piping into this house.

Why are we pushing kids so hard to get this letter or that point?

What does any of it prove?

The point system here is literally called quality points.

What does quality even mean when it is overused at every turn?

It means the same as nothing.

Because we love to use a word until it loses all its meaning whatsoever.

One of my favorite quotes that summarizes this is actually from the Disney movie The Incredibles.

The villain says, “When you make everyone special, then no one is.”

The premise seems to be to get a better number to get a better life.

(To be clear – this is not what the three gracious women were teaching.

It is, instead, what I think the system is promoting.)

And so your student learns to perform if the end result will look good on paper.

To volunteer if the hours will equal enough to be impressive.

To choose extracurricular activities around what will be enticing to a college and constantly shed a better light on themselves.

There’s your motivation, students.

Do good.

It might serve you well.

Work hard in that field –

if you think your college of choice would like that.

I know there must be some balance in there.

I know you can’t always be a rebel.

Systems keep progressing because people need them.

But I sure have a hard time being the hand that feeds them.