When does it stop being fun and start being work?

There is this phenomenon that, as educators around the world, we see through every child's life. When does school stop being fun and start being work? Usually it is hard to pinpoint that moment in a child's life. Can you remember when you stopped enjoying learning and started learning because you had to? I doubt it.

Today, I had one of those moments where my heart ached as I learned when it stopped being fun for a recent former student.

I had a child, let's call her Anne, who spoke a language other than English at home. In her Junior Kindergarten year she didn't speak a single word and with me in her Senior Kindergarten class she all of a sudden started crafting sentences and speaking to be heard around January. It was a great break through and showed us all the wonderful learning she had been doing while she listened intently! We realized we had a very smart little girl on our hands who enjoyed things like counting, simple addition and even letter sounds. It exceeded our expectations and it was great!

This year that same little girl is in Grade One. I was talking to her teacher today about her and her teacher mentioned that she was falling behind because she writes like she talks-- as a child who does not have a firm grasp on English. She is falling behind because when other children write things like "I went to the park.", she will write things like "I go to park okay."

Now, this is very typical, and, frankly, to be expected, but I never really thought about how much support she would need in Grade One to learn things like tenses, how to form proper sentences and more. She started going to tutoring to help, but the tutor just had her copy our rhyming words and other words without working on the conventions of the language. So what happens to this little girl who needs help to learn English conventions? She certainly doesn't get hours of help each week to learn the conventions of the language shee needs to succeed, but let's now bring that to the governments attention-- the same government that is trying to cut thousands of support jobs with our budget. These support jobs are the things that help students like Anne who are extremely bright, but still learning English or French.

So I come back to the question: When does it stop being fun and start being work? My answer for this girl, is Grade One. In Kindergarten we didn't worry too much that she wasn't speaking in full, grammatically correct sentences because she simply spoke! Here, her knowledge was being tested every day and she was full speed ahead learning new things every day with her peers. In kindergarten we are thrilled when a child masters a skill-- even if that skill takes two years, but in the higher grades there is a tight  and well-scripted curriculum to follow and you either stay ahead or fall behind. The issue in these higher grade becomes, for example, if you miss out learning about counting by 5s, 10s and 20s in Grade 1, then you miss out on counting by 2s in Grade 2, and when you learn to multiply in Grade 3 it is difficult without being able to count by a number. By the time Grade 4 and 5 come around, you are doing harder and harder multiplication and division-- which is extremely difficult if you didn't understand the lessons on simple multiplication or counting by numbers earlier. The curriculum strangles our ability to freely teach based on interest, need, and individual learning speeds and styles because we feel strangled by this need to teach each unit in the few weeks we have before the school year ends, the best we can.

I think this is the new challenge the government needs to accept full on. Instead of compacting and jamming more curriculum into each year, why not say to the teachers, "It doesn't matter if it takes your students 6 days or 6 months, let's just see if we can continue to teach them about counting by a number."? I guess the answer is that we are so afraid that our students will not come out of the factory the same.

What if Johnny in reached Grade 5 and didn't quite have a grasp on area and perimeter but had a huge working knowledge of geometry and Anna got to grade 2 and didn't have a strong concept of printing, but could type with the best of them? Maybe Anna will grow up in a world where neat printing is no longer necessary and perhaps Johnny will start to learn about perimeter later when he becomes interested in finding the perimeter of his geometric shapes. We are so afraid of having a child lose out on a single piece of knowledge that we insist everyone has the same learning, and just lose some studnets on the way as casualties of the education system that we can't help because, frankly, we don't have the time or funding.

I doubt I will ever see it, but I would love to be able to see in my lifetime a school system that wasn't a factory spewing out students with the same knowledge given to them and categorized by grade, but a school system that teaches to interests, themes, topics, and is individualized to each student. How about a government who acknowledges the vital role that ESL and Special Education teachers play in helping students keep up with the ever more demanding workload we force on students as young as five? How about a government that, instead of just telling us that we are teaching "21st Century Students", helps us to do so by providing access to basic technology within each classroom? Maybe even a government that sees that each classroom is an intricate social network that requires different skills, methods and strategies every year, thereby requiring different resources and support workers?

One can dream...

~Miss. Sunshine