Like many compellingly outrageous topics on education I’ve had brought to my attention, this one was found at Ernie’s 3-D Pancakes. 

Here is an article on the subject…and another.

The thrust of the story is, this 17-year-old kid wanted to get into an honors math course at his high school, and as a condition of admission into this class he has to complete three very difficult calculus problems over the course of the summer.  It must be stressed that this was a voluntary assignment…insofar as the student could have opted to stay in the regular course of mathematics, and not do the problems.

Basically, he wanted to be special, and smart, and recognized for his pursuit of excellence, and have exceptional opportunities opened up for him without actually doing anything extra to deserve it.

And now, he’s suing his teacher for “ruining his summer.”  So…well…not being terribly comfortable with being judgmental of other people, I nonetheless say …WTF?

I understand that he didn’t want to spend the summer doing calculus.  Trigonometry alone gave me panic attacks.  This is where a choice comes in.  You get to make choices, and then you act on them…or not.  I might allow that there would be some argument against the teacher requiring the students to attend classes or meetings over the summer…or any other egregiously burdensome requirement…as children rarely are in control of such things, and family concerns take precedent over the summer.  But three problems, which they could pace themselves on doesn’t seem to be an egregious burden…any more than asking a kid who wants to go out for Band or Orchestra to prepare an audition piece on their own time, or requiring football players to stick to a training regimen over the summer.  God forbid that we ever have lower standards for special academic programs than we do for sports programs.

Further, the father’s defense of the lawsuit is so schizophrenic as to be laughable.  He asked the school district to show him the law that allowed them to assign work over the summer.   They could not.  So, he concludes that this is not a frivolous lawsuit.

If this flies, I’m going to tell my kids to go into law and specialize in school-related litigation.  I’ll have that retirement villa in the south of Spain yet…just imagine the possibilities for suing the school systems for doing things that they don’t have a specific guarantee under the law of being allowed to do.  Where’s the law that says they get to hold kids to scheduled bathroom breaks?  Where’s the law that says there can be a spelling test on weeks with only four school days in them?  Where’s the law that says they can prohibit a child from having more than one friend ride home with them on the bus?

So, having established that I think this lawsuit is misplaced and the argument of the plaintiffs is flawed…let me do the liberal thing and say where I think this might be coming from…and propose that we look at the underlying causes and see what we can do about them.

I talk to a lot of people, and I read a lot of opinion pieces, and from the whiney side of things I get a lot of “The school is taking over our free time”, “there’s too much homework”, “We don’t have time to be a family”, and my personal favorite:  “Kids need time to just be kids”.

And I’ve noticed in my own life, that the school district has relied more and more on parents and the kids to be responsible for their education.  When I was a kid, I had very little homework, and most of it got done in school.  When a teacher told me to write a paper, they gave me a packet that told me how to do it, and we went over the essay form until it was lasered indelibly into my brain.  I pretty much got the hand-holding treatment from teachers, and rarely had to ask my parents to help me with anything.  We didn’t have to do reading minutes, or flashcards, or get assigned educational games or required family field trips outside of school.  My parents would never have THOUGHT about paying for someplace like Sylvan.

Now days, parents pretty much have to spend their evenings and weekends picking up the slack for increasingly strapped school districts.  For instance, our school district is cutting hours from the school day to save money.  Who is going to make up that time?  Parents who care about their children’s education, of course.  Our school district has also placed a moratorium on class field trips, so we have already been assigned one family field trip this year.  I spend an hour every day doing basic skills work with Bunny Boy, plus homework time…and record our time and accomplishments in a ledger that goes back to school.  Adventure Boy has reached an age where he is able to do much of his extra work on his own and keep his own ledger, so that has gotten easier.

But I think that this lawsuit, and the strong public support of this child from fellow students and parents is less about three calculus problems, and more a reaction to the growing trend of schools pushing more and more responsibility for a child’s education onto the children themselves, and by extension, onto their parents…and children who want an exceptional education have to go to even more exceptional lengths to get it.  I just bet that this is the first family in this district to reach their “enough point”.

But then, this is what you get when you demand “fiscal responsibility” from your schools, combined with a demand that they somehow achieve greater and greater results on less and less money.…they eliminate “excess functions” like holding your child’s hand and spoon-feeding them information.  They cut the number of students who can be served by special advanced programs (the most expensive ones, and the ones that get the least amount of federal funding), and by extension increase the competition for admission into those programs.  They demand more effort and personal accountability from you and your child if you want to get into those programs.

It could be that the previous generation grew up with unrealistic expectations of how schools were going to teach their children everything they needed to know without the parents having to do anything.  I know I was surprised (and generally delighted) at how active I was expected to be…and I have seen the expectations grow every year with a shrinking budget and the demands of greater performance.  And yes, the pressure has increased, and the stress on our whole family.  Sometimes I resent it when it feels like all we do is school-related stuff, and it still isn’t enough…but ultimately, it’s just the result of our values as a society, and we can accept it and move on…doing what we have to do to get by in the system as it is, or we can try to change it…

…but crying about it and suing the school district isn’t going to help the underlying issues.  In fact, it makes at least one of the worse, by costing the district money to defend themselves from lawsuits, and paying any sort of settlement that might (God forbid) be ordered.