Our youngest child, Johnny, is the only one still at home. He is getting by, waiting for something to happen. He works for his aunt in Williamsburg three to five days a week on a long-term project. He clears land, cuts down old trees, builds things and does odd jobs around the property. The rest of the time, when he is home, he plays intricate video games on a national network.
Our two oldest children did very well in school. The next two we carefully guided through the morass that is the special education department in the Las Cruces schools, much to the consternation of District officials. Child number five had her education modified and accommodated through a 504 plan. Then there was Johnny, the only one still in school when his mother died.
His senior year in high school became an oddity. He didn't skip school. He attended all his classes. But he was just there, putting in time while his education sauntered out the door. There were a number of times that I looked up his grades online just after the midpoint of the semester. Had I not kept track I would never have known that he was floundering because his teachers just let children who were failing sink at a proscribed rate.
So I stepped in and saw to it that Johnny had a fair chance at completing his work. He did want to graduate. He just forgot how. What I won't forget is how harsh and punitive his teachers sounded, how they talked about responsibility while shirking their own. How they relished the possibility of his failing, completely forgetting the role they played in his predicament.
What Johnny needed were teachers, real ones, who understood the nature of his problems and monitored his lack of progress then told me about it as it descended. What he got was a delayed accounting on TeacherEase containing admonitions, threats and ultimatums, not concerns and options. Not even some teachers who knew me personally took the time to apprise me of his possible disaster. I was accustomed to getting a call or a note from a teacher warning of a pending failure. (It was my practice to do so with possible failures in my classes.)
Of course, when I sent a note asking why I hadn't heard about this situation sooner, the teachers did respond favorably. We were left with a hurried, frantic remedy that often didn't seem related to learning but the compilation of reading exercises and written assignments that didn't seem to be meeting course requirements so much as busy work. I was grateful for the opportunity. I didn't understand the educational value. Assignments seemed mechanical and redundant.
Which brings us to current concerns. Rather than heed warnings about the futility of the factory model of education, where students are not so much vessels to be filled as products to be manufactured, this model is being refined and applied with a vengeance, sometimes literally. Students are not even allowed to be the workers in the factory, producing something. They are the raw materials to be manipulated by the process into compilations of test scores.
Teachers are mere facilitators, labor applying the process under stringent supervision by another of the factors of production. Management's primary role is to see to it that the process is applied by labor. Amazingly, some information is scripted and delivered by rote with no allowance for any personal skills a teacher might be able to apply.
Those who can do; those who can't measure. That is the goal of too many schools today: to manipulate and measure output. It is not to provide good citizens for the community or prepare individual students for the next step they will take after public schooling is done. It is to make learning a finite thing and measure it.
If a student is likely to go to a community college, or a technical school, or work on a farm or ranch, perhaps marry and start a family, there is no place in the factory model for him or her. The only path is to college and coursework is designed for that. The likelihood that all students will master geometry and Algebra II is not high, yet they are required for graduation, not just for students who are interested in and have a capacity for mathematics.
In Johnny's case, the only courses that turned out to be useful were his woodworking classes. He uses what he learned there at his aunt's every week. He is also learning to use a variety of machines and equipment and how to repair them. If he was still in school, he'd be immediately turned off by the new approach. He's the sort that relies on a teacher's ability to invest him in the course of study, not how well-oiled is the machine.
Take comfort that this, too, will pass.
Bill Varuola is longtime resident of Las Cruces who recently retired as a teacher at the Doña Ana County Juvenile Detention Center.