Before writing this blog I sat here pondering a title which is why I went with the title above. I’ve been trying to understand the newly found generational gap between my children and yesterday when my oldest brought up all his old books from high school something became very clear to me! It is truly amazing how things have changed since we were kids and it’s even more amazing how much things have changed in just the last few years. My focus is on our schooling principles. My children are really not very far apart in age. My oldest was born in 2002 and my youngest was born in 2011. I have five children and they are all within a two to three year gap at the most. Think back right now to when you were in school. Paper, pens, pencils, notebooks; actual books! We had actual darn books! We “literally” wrote in a notebook. Teachers stood in the front of the classroom and “wrote” on a board as they taught. No Chrome books, no “smart” boards. I stood for about ten minutes looking all my son’s hand-written work and I was astonished. My kids, the ones that are still in school barely take notes and everything is on their chrome books. This is not new to me, obviously, I had the time to think about this once I was reflecting about things while looking through all my son’s notebooks.
I know times change and I understand that we, for the most part go with the changing times. Everything around us is changing. The bottom line is that all the evolving changes that are happening around us are not evolving our minds anymore. Computers are doing all the thinking and writing for us. Do you remember having to actually take the time out to look a word up in the dictionary? I do. I don’t even think most kids these days know what a hand held dictionary is! I remember it being a staple in school. It was part of our school supply list and if we didn’t have one there was always one available in the classroom. Naturally, the process of physically having to look the word up made our minds have to do all the work. Google was certainly not there to take that away from us. Each school year I set my children up for success and teach them how to be organized, dividers are color coded and all! Writing, in general is barely a thing in most classrooms from what I can see. Each school year there is a school supply list. At the end of the school year I have tons of notebooks that are unused or barely used. It saddens me. Of course I try and push my kids to keep traditional note taking going, however i get the same answer each time. “Mom, we do not need to take notes. The teacher gave us a packet”. A packet. Seriously!? Where is the actual fun and learning in that? For fucks sake, in all honestly I just do not get it. Rather than argue I just go with the changing times. I recently found out in the last few years that some of my kids teachers use YouTube videos and other means of videos that they put on in the classroom as my kids are filling out their packets. Again, where is the fun in learning here? For the teacher and the student.
I very recently just found out that my middle school aged kids do not go outside for recess. Are you kidding me?! Does our school system really expect these children to sit inside all day? It’s no wonder ADD/ADHD has become more diagnosed or shall I say “Mis-diagnosed”. It’s so easy to slap a diagnosis on kids these days. I am going to share something. Two out of my five children have shown very apparent signs of having some kind of attention deficit disorder going on. I have experienced the phone calls where the conversations left their teachers speechless. Let’s go back to the above mentioned disorders that are being thrown around. I’d like you to pick a part the work “Dis-order”. All it means is that something is not in order. Does our life and how we live it always have to be in order and look the same as everyone else’s? Do we all have to think the same way? Do we all learn the same way? Lastly, do we all have to conform to our newly-aged systems? The answer is absolutely not. So; Why are we all expecting our children to conform to all of this if their brains are meant to do so much more. Every single child is different in their own way. All five of my children are. Not one of them in my household learns the same way, so why are we expecting all kids to?
It’s no wonder so many parents have decided to home school their children. To be honest, if I had elementary school grade kids just starting out I would too! I do not like what is going on. I do not like it one bit. There are times where I am counting down the years that I have to be involved with our public school system and I think it’s really sad. I have turned my head to so many things over the years and there’s one thing that is becoming very apparent to me; It’s another system that is slowly breaking down. Our school system is breaking down as so many other societal systems are. With that said, I am just going to call it what it is…!
Love and Light, Always.
Diana Rose Borisuck.
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