Darcy Doesn't Care

Darcy doesn’t have any interest in pleasing me, or any of her teachers. Education isn’t her first priority.  In fact, it’s not a priority at all.  I’m not the enemy, precisely, but if I ceased to exist, it would be one less voice babbling in her ear about the future.

Sometimes just dealing with the present is enough, and somehow answering stupid questions about why the author included the detail about the physical appearance of the hedgehog in the test passage we are working with in class don’t seem that important to her in this particular present.  Maybe it would matter more if answering questions about hedgehogs had some immediate implications to getting free of her crappy home life or putting a decent meal in front of her, but any real control over those aspects of her existence is still at least five years away, and it’s been made pretty clear by people a lot like me that those five years will be wasted and life will continue to be a struggle if she doesn’t pass the tests she keeps failing and if she doesn't stay on the honor roll, so in the end it all just seems pointless. 

She doesn’t view me as evil, though, and she doesn’t wish me any harm or ill will.  In fact, Darcy is a decent person, and if I were laying on the floor bleeding, she would be one of the first students to come to my aid. 

I’m not bleeding, though. I’m asking her to read about hedgehogs and answer a bunch of stupid questions about them. (And make no mistake, they are stupid questions.)  She’s never seen a hedgehog, and doesn’t care about them any more than she cares about me.  Last week, I had them writing about what they would change if they could change one thing about the school dress code.  

Darcy doesn’t care about the dress code either.  She wears clothes to school, and like any 7^th grader she paradoxically tries to blend in completely and get noticed by her classmates at the same time.  Mostly, she wants to avoid the hassle of hearing negative comments about what she wears.  If she ever violated the dress code, it would be only because she wasn’t thinking about whether the shorts she wore to the mall last week were a little too short for school. They’re just shorts, after all.  She bought them at Target, which is hardly Frederick’s of Hollywood, and they weren’t cheap.  

Of course, hedgehogs and dress codes don’t matter to me either.  Neither of those things even touch on the reason Darcy is here in my classroom.  To me, it’s all just practice.  Read and answer questions; write reasoned, structured essays.  Some kids take an interest in odd animals, some don’t. Not every kid hates reading about them. As for the dress code, I have enough students who like to argue about rules that it seems like a worthwhile assignment.  I have a list of standards to teach, and the list is long.  These simple passages and topics allow me to cover the standards and teach the concepts which is what I am constantly told to focus on.

Darcy, of course, has an entirely different way of looking at it.  Solutions matter, everything else is just noise. Darcy doesn’t have time or patience for any of it.  She doesn’t want to be bothered about hedgehogs or 5-paragraph essays or Harry Potter or symbolism or conjunctions or any of the other nonsense I prattle on about, and she certainly doesn’t care if her test scores or grades meet my expectations.

Does she know her ability to get a job in the future might depend on those scores? 

Maybe.

Or maybe she knows better than most of us that all of that is a lie.  Maybe she understands that, unless some much more fundamental things get fixed, where she comes from, who she knows, and whoever is raising her will continue to dominate what she is and what opportunities she has before her.  Maybe she understands that, currently, our education system isn’t really offering her a way out or a way up.  The skills she really needs – the types of communication that happen in the real world - aren’t being taught.

There was a time when we studied art and literature and philosophy, even history and science, in English class, reading and analyzing texts that had had a legitimate impact on our culture and society.  One could argue that we were a more progressive and empathetic culture 30 years ago because the main focus in English class tended to be on fundamental skills and important, world-changing things that were written in English or translated from other languages.

Now, we focus on basic comprehension.  We read about hedgehogs, and airplanes, and little stories about kids who find ways to make friends or do something nice for their community.  We don’t read or write things that are professionally done, with a real purpose in mind, much less brilliantly written by the greatest writers in the history of the English language.  

We’re failing kids on every level.  Nothing we use in class is particularly “good” in any sense. It’s writing, but it’s not writing that has any significance. Beyond that, though, it’s not practical.  Darcy might not care about reading job descriptions and learning to understand and write good business letters, e-mails, and legal prose, but at least those are things that will directly affect her ability to survive.  There’s plenty to be learned through the type of practice we do, but we aren’t making any practical connections to the real world. 

The problem isn’t lazy students and it isn’t that they're too young to understand the wisdom in what we’re doing. Students hate the way we teach to the standards because most of it is pointless and stupid.  Kids like Darcy may not know what their future holds, and they would probably complain about school regardless of how the content was presented. In the best of situations, it would be hard to make Darcy care much about school. 

But we're not even trying.  Reading matters when it peaks student interest, or when it has real-world implications. English class needs to focus on actual practical skills, and at the same time needs to present the best writing that our culture has to offer.  Lessons need to deal with basic mechanics and grammar, with various types of writing and text structures, and with quality writing that will truly inspire. In other words, students need to do exercises involving capitalization and commas usage like students did long ago, and then teachers need to find works of real significance to read in class.

Beyond that, we need to incorporate real world business requirements and show the real consequences of poor communication.  Students need to see job descriptions, write resumes, fill out applications, solve problems, think about case studies, and deal with the types of communication that happen in actual workplaces. Most of all, they need to be publishing work, showing it to peers and others and working to meet a standard that would be acceptable beyond the classroom.  

Instead, we focus on basic comprehension and make a minimum competency test our final objective. We try to engage students with gimmicks and nonsense and by letting students work in groups on projects that have no obvious real-world connections.  The English standards, in and of themselves, are irrelevant to everyone, including the teachers that have to deliver them, and the focus on those standards has taken all of the creativity and discipline out of education.  Yes, the standards focus attention on basic fundamental skills like making inferences and finding the main idea, but when your only focus is on reading for the sake of reading stuff, and on writing for the sake of writing stuff, then reading and writing really suck. 

And Darcy knows that. If we want her to care, we're going to have to give her something to care about.