Danny and Me at Dinner: Pointed, Relevant Questions

Danny (an alias) sat across from me at dinner the other night. He was in no mood to mess around. He got right to what was on his mind.

That happens when you're eight. He'd just been through something, and wanted to know if an adult had had a similar experience.

So he asked me, right out of the blue: "Do you play a musical instrument?"

Because his mother, you know, had just taken him and his brother from their music practices to where we were, our church, for dinner and service. In an indication, perhaps, of what people are thinking in Milwaukee, in a day of reports on the jettisoning of coronavirus stoppage to yet another unqualified crony and a mass murder not four miles away, there were more people than seats provided for dinner. We were seated in the overflow area.

Not being one to deliver fake news or anything other than the flat-out truth, I answered his question: "No, I don't. It's one of my biggest regrets, though."

They're a couple of active little boys. Creative people are like that: They have energy that doesn't necessarily stop when their instruments do. I saw that when I had tried to pull up next to their mini-van in the parking lot. The boys had exited the vehicle, but instead of simply walking toward the back door, they felt they needed to show me their, well, gestations of something or other as I waited for their mother to beckon them. They were, in other words, being silly, which is what schoolboys do, not thinking that they needed to get the heck out of the way any second now so I could pull into the adjacent space.

I hadn't known they'd be across from me, but as long as they were, Danny must have figured, why not strike up a conversation? And why not discuss the very thing he was just finished doing? Seemed appropriate enough. See, this is why people who want to control even children's recess periods are so far off-base: All you have to do is go out onto the playground and listen. The kids will, in all likelihood, tell you what they've been learning. The endorphins manufactured by activity will deliver the message.

All this is good. Most of the time, the kids will let you know. Much, much better than not. Kids who are too quiet are kids with way too much on their minds and need a place to burn it off.

But we don't like that, actually. We want the kids to stay quiet so we can teach them. Would that we didn't have to, but there are too many of them and not enough teachers to be comfortable with just letting them be. Some people actually think that there's no real difference in the educational quality of increasing class sizes. Most of them are Republicans.

But it wasn't party affiliation that was on Danny's mind. Something else was. I asked him what grade he was in.

"Third," he said. And then, immediately without considering any consequences, without raising his voice, without anything besides a matter-of-fact, he added, "We have to take a test almost every day."

Looking back, maybe this was Danny trying to say that this was a new phenomenon in his schooling career, that for the first time, he'd been confronted by testing almost every day: Not the kind of test in an actual subject matter covered by a textbook, but the kind of testing someone else he'd never met and would never know had concocted for him and his classmates to tell, as if they ever could, whether he was learning something or whether the school and the teacher were teaching him anything. Maybe he was surprised by this, surprised enough to tell the first person he thought might be interested in hearing it. But he wasn't happy about it; he needed a place to burn it off. He didn't say it with a smile.

It was like he was posing another pointed question: How come we gotta do this all of a sudden? I didn't have an answer I knew would satisfy him.

Neither did his mother, seated between the two boys. "And they do everything on the computer now," she said. Statistics must be compiled. Algorithms must be justified. And prestige must be determined.

Mom just shook her head. I followed up with stories I'd experienced in Little Rock, where I saw 4th graders try to deal with whole mornings at their desks, not able to have recess or even bathroom breaks. Think that doesn't throw off test results? I posed to Mom. She got that immediately. Except for wrapping boxes for Amazon, maybe, when adults have to go to the bathroom, they go. No sense being a Spartan. Dry bed training ended long ago.

And Mom and I agreed that the catch-22 has been set into place, wherefore the preparation for taking the tests takes up so much time that the kids don't have enough time to learn enough to succeed at the tests they've spend so much time getting prepared for. So they get good at exactly one thing: The process of taking tests. That's it. That's the bulk of what they know the best. I said this to various groups when I was with the NEA leadership, making sure they got it--and that ended eleven years ago.

This is happening everywhere, but especially in public schools, where the numbers in this maddening system of check-and-recheck can't get beyond a certain competence because, of course, there just isn't enough time. So the naysayers, mostly Republicans, condemn the public schools and advocate for charters and vouchers so they can scrape off the kids who do the best on such tests and leave the others for the failing government schools, and of course drain the money away to further diminish their capabilities. The beatings will stop when morale improves.

So here's another kid, a polite young man, who wants to know things and is in a hurry to learn them because, at least up to this point, things had been fun, you know? But now this weird test-a-day thing seemed, well, in the way.

I wanted to tell him to hang in there, that some day he'd have a system that didn't demand such nonsense and would allow his teachers to really teach things they could have time for. But there would be no fake news in this conversation: More of it was on the way. More testing, less fun. It seemed like sabotage to do that right in front of his mother, who also knows this.

I hoped that Danny's inclination of musicality would keep his mind expansive and hopeful and above all inquisitive, that the awful system we've slid ourselves into wouldn't kill off yet another kid's advantages just from being a kid: discovery and wonder. Once one has it, one tends to keep it and keeps asking relevant questions. Once one loses it, once tends to hang over the bar on Fridays, bemoaning the schools that imprisoned him-her and the teachers that didn't really care.

Except they did. They, too, were imprisoned. And they had relevant questions, too, questions that others in charge, in legislatures, in think-tanks that turned all of them into widgets cranking out statistics instead of people hungry for knowing things about this amazing world of ours, brushed off as irrelevant. And so they, too, trudged on until they could see that the original purpose of enlightenment and all they had hoped to do had been compromised out of notice, and they could do what the kids can't do whenever they want: walk away.

I have one more relevant question: Why are there teacher shortages now? Maybe because everyone has to take a test every day. No other retired teacher I've spoken with has said anything other than, There's no way you could get me back into a classroom now, absolutely not. It didn't make us better than the ones we left behind. It just made us luckier.

Our educational system is running out of luck. Sooner or later, there will be a reckoning. You can't do all this on the cheap. You can't do it with numbers. Kids must be kept happy to learn or we will be a grumbling, victimized nation of discontents. It almost looks as if someone wants it that way.

Be well. Be careful. I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark