Maxi's Choice

Book excerpt: I began teaching 35 years ago, but this is not a book about how wonderful schools are. Nor is it a book complementing education about a job well done. KIDS never seem to rise to the level of expectations of the caretakers of our schools. Unless they're the students who completely comply and excel, it seems some little part of their make up, too often repulses the people who are supposed to have compassion and understanding for their weaknesses and psychological frailties. Education has a knack for suffocating creativity, establishing unrealistically high expectations, repressing exciting, expressive adolescent personalities, and perpetuating a system that is dull and disconnected from the potentials of technology. Instead of paving the way for student success, it creates unnecessary and complicated roadblocks that constantly keep students and parents off balance and confused. Teachers and administrators led by the "Theory Heads" in state and federal government positions have established success in college as the gold standard. Everyone is judged as a person according to whether they meet that narrow standard of success. There within the problem lies. The common thread that runs deep throughout this system is the fact that most of the people making the rules are well-educated, were great students, wouldn't recognize a disability or a "child at risk" if they slapped them in the face and yet they are the people who pave the runways by which we all fly. They equate high GPA's with effective teaching and effective learners. They want to perpetuate the system in their own likeness and they have. Students in the top 25% of their class will always succeed. However, a group I call the "Muddled Middle" gets the leftovers, and little respect. It is those misunderstood, lost and timid souls, along with their families for which I write this book.