Sunshine and Other Elusive Things

Today is a beautiful day.

 

I didn’t know that, of course, until 3:30, because my work space is a cinderblock square with no windows, located in the middle of a cinderblock hallway.  Sounds like a prison, yes?

I only knew that the sun was shining and the weather was warm after hearing it from other people who had ventured outside.  So my students and I decided to explore a surprisingly nice February day in the Midwest by going outside to have class.  What we discovered (which is something I already knew, but tend to overlook) is that our outside perimeter has no place to sit and commune or read or discuss.  We all sat on a concrete sidewalk by a parking lot in the back of the school.  There are no benches.  No seats of any kind.  Don’t get me wrong, the experience was far better than being totally Vitamin D deficient, but having ANY sort of semi-comfortable gathering place outside would be a bonus. 

We could have gone to the front of the building, where there are a handful of concrete benches, but there’s no quiet out front – just cars and noise and surveillance cameras.

Even INSIDE, the school provides no place for people to find solace.  The library has comfy chairs, but the comfort ends there.  The benches at the ends of the hallways are made of hefty metal mesh.  The benches in the commons area of the school are all concrete.  Repose is elusive there.  It’s as if the school is saying, “here’s a place to sit, but we don’t want anyone to get too relaxed, so here’s some concrete”.   

Oh, and there is no teacher’s lounge or even department commons – those rooms look and feel (and smell) just like the rest of the building:  industrial.

My old school had a senior lounge.  And a junior lounge.  And an outdoor amphitheater for things like reading Shakespeare out loud, in the sun, to recreate a literary and personal vibe. 

Since when did public schools become part of the prison industrial complex?  No wonder the kids just want out all the time.  We should let the kids OUT, not lock them in.  We should encourage high school students to graduate early, if they have all their credits.  We should encourage kids to schedule a late start or an early release, so they can get a job or get more rest or go for a run or just LIVE THEIR LIVES outside of an antiquated zone of containment.  How else can we expect them to function as proper adults once they graduate?  Yes, some kids need the whole eight hours, five days a week – but not all kids need that. 

High school students dislike regimented school for a reason:  they are being treated like cattle.  They are just learning to cheat (or “use all their resources” as they like to tell me), because they don’t have time on a daily basis to do homework for seven or eight different classes every day.  When students have found an app on which they can simply hold their phones over a math problem, and the app does all the work for them (steps included), they aren’t learning anything!  (Well, to be fair, they’re learning how to differently navigate the operational systems of their phones.)  I’m just saying that people of ALL ages need time to just breathe in the air and figure out who they are, independent of a million rules, all designed to regulate their behavior. 

Try to remember being 16 or 17 or 18 years old, and acknowledge that high school students are among those “huddled masses, yearning to be free”.