How many five-year-olds can I take?

Special thanks to Chris Baskind from Snarfd for sharing this utterly bizarre quiz from the internets with me earlier today. If it is to be trusted, I can take on a whole horde of 5-year-olds. Go ahead. Test your morals capacity.

Who Needs Monday Through Friday? (How Public Education Is Failing My Sons)

At the beginning of the current school year, Avonworth Elementary School dropped a bomb on its students and their families. The bomb arrived on a pink sheet of paper, one of nearly 40 pages of unorganized, unstructured “announcements” that made their way home in my son’s backpack during the first week of school. Verbatim, it read:

 

8/27/2007

 

This year Avonworth Elementary is going to adopt a more educationally sound scheduling practice. Beginning this year we are going to be on a five day rotation cycle. Instead of Monday through Friday, we are going to follow a Day 1 through Day 5 schedule. This revised schedule will result in no students missing their specials class. Most of our scheduled Inservice/Act Days fall on certain days of the week. (We missed over 9 Mondays last year). The Rotation Day Calendar will be sent home to you with your child at the beginning of each month so you will know ahead of time what specials class your child has. Calendar could change due to inclement weather also, and if that happens you will receive another revised calendar.

If you have any questions, please call me at (number removed).

Sincerely,

 

(name removed)

Elementary Principal

Note: This letter is published on the Avonworth Elementary School website. You can view the entire letter here.

Here’s what the resulting calendar looks like (click it to enlarge):

There’s so much to say about this, but so little required – it seems to me.  Where should I start?
At the beginning of the school year, Monday was Day 1. All was well with the universe.  But the universe has since changed.

Within a month, Day 3 was falling on a Monday.  By mid-October, Day 2 will replace Day 3 as the Monday designation.  Or is it that Monday is now falling on Day 3 and will soon fall on Day 2?  To me, that’s the source of the problem here:  Which way of conceptualizing the week is primary?  The answer is so obvious that the question is absurd.   The implicit claim here is that the importance of In Service / Act days supersedes everything – even the thousands of years old established system of the weekly calendar.  They have embarked upon a rewrite of one of the cornerstones of industrialized civilization – because the CHOICE between fewer In Service days and kids missing P.E. was one they couldn’t stomach.

When I was younger and more revolutionary, I was taught (and I embraced) that if we don’t like the way the world works, we can and should endeavor to change it.  But this change is so disruptive, so out of sync with the rest of civilization, that it has the effect of turning its back on the most fundamental purpose of education: to prepare kids to participate in the established world into which we all must flow.  To me, this is a fundamental, stark betrayal of that obligation.  Though dressed in terms like “educationally sound,” it is functionally insane.  It disrupts and confuses students and parents alike.  I fear it serves only a narrow group of special interests, with perspectives too myopic to be entrusted with my children’s sound education.

Yellowjacket Peril

If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.

I imagine we all received that simple advice. Skeptically though I received it, accept it I did when my dad insisted repeatedly that I had little if anything to fear from the wasps in my childhood yard in Texas. The lesson learned was that minding one’s own business produces safety.

To be sure, if you go stirring up a wasp’s nest, you’re likely to get stung. I recently witnessed this when a friend of my seven-year-old son held a birthday party outside on a beautiful fall day. Adults and children played in a field while cake was prepared, food set out, etc. They played chase, cricket, tag – 2nd grader games.

One of those games, apparently, had been named “repeatedly jam a tree branch into that hole in the ground, just because that’s fun.” I didn’t hear any of the kids call it that, but I came to understand it shortly after the first kid started screaming bloody murder from across the lawn. The child had evidently been stung by a bee, and was rolling around in pain on the ground, crying out for mercy and assistance. What adult can resist a child’s helpless call for help? None, from what I saw: a horde of adults rushed to provide aid, and I was no exception. As I raced to the scene of the sting though, I heard another cry – this one from one of MY sons. I changed course and soon found him – tears in his eyes, swatting desperately at his arm, screaming in distress and pain. I helped him brush multiple yellowjackets off of his arm, and ran with him away from the area. But they kept on him, and he was stung a total of six times in the course of the next 60 seconds or less.

Meanwhile, several other kids had gotten in on the screaming, and the volume and panic had reached zoo levels. My youngest son, it soon became clear, had been victim to the attack as well. The yellowjackets were everywhere, and they were madder than… well, they were madder than hornets.

All in all, 5 children were stung – multiple times each. I handed out Benadryl to anyone in need, and kids were shuffled into cars for safekeeping from the flying marauders. When we, the adults, investigated what had happened, we found that the kids – far from being victims – had been antagonizing the yellowjackets with the aforementioned game. Apparently, the motion of churning butter, when applied by tree branch to an underground nest of thousands of yellowjackets, causes consternation in the hive and leads to retribution. Who knew? …my dad did – and he taught me well.

Now, my sons know too, and the welts they earned acquiring that wisdom have all but faded. The bigger lesson though – don’t mess with others and others won’t mess with you – may have been lost. As I deal with a provocateur in my adult life right now, I am reminded by my reactions that each of us takes a turn as the wasp sometimes, just as each of us takes turns as the antagonist – and frequently cries victim when we feel retribution’s sting.

What does it take to truly teach the lesson: live and let live?