School is So Boring Daddy!

From Will Richardson's excellent blog on Education

Yesterday as I was driving my seven-year old daughter home from her gymnastics class she ominously announced that she wasn't going back to school.

"It's so boring, daddy," she said, and then proceed to sing the word "boring" about 157 times to make sure I got the point. Now I know Tess is pretty smart, and I know that she's not being challenged by some of the curriculum which she learned a year ago at home. But I wondered if there was more to it.

"We do the same stuff every day," she said as she poked holes in the paper mache turtle she'd made in class. "Everybody does the same stuff." My mind caught a picture of 18 cloned paper mache turtles drying on the window sill in her classroom.

And there it was. "Everybody" is doing the same stuff in second grade, no matter if some of them know that stuff already, or some of them learn that stuff differently, or some of them relate to that stuff in unique ways, or some of them just aren't interested that stuff. Now mind you, Tess just came off of a week of standardized testing, which makes my stomach churn just to write it. So she might be having some reaction to the forced demonstration of skills that our current system deems essential for a sound education. But I'm sure most of her feelings stem from having to do what everyone else does on a daily basis.

I am now convinced that our approach of "Imposition" vs "Invitation" is at the heart of the profound disengagement that we are seeing in our schools. I am off this afternoon to join a group who seek to change this on PEI. We are made up of folks from our local Community College, the Faculty of Education at UPEI, the School Board and a few odd folks like me. Our intent - to ask kids what they would like to do and find out ways of making this happen.

As we make progress I will talk more