High School, Past and Present

It’s homeschool curriculum sorting and planning time again. Every year, while perusing catalogs, checking in on message boards, referencing online scope and sequence guidelines, as well as state standards to be met, I’m struck with a huge realization: In my own experience of public and parochial school education, all of those guidelines and standards were seldom met.

If I were to list the college preparatory classes I took while in high school, it would surely sound impressive. In four years of high school, I took the following mathematics courses: Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II, Trigonometry, and Calculus. I took the following science courses: Biology, Chemistry, Anatomy & Physiology/Marine Biology (two semesters of one, followed by two semesters of the other), and Physics. That sounds like a lot of math and science, doesn’t it? And yet, it was a shallow education, and most of my teachers were either ill-equipped to help us, or just so frustrated that they had given up years earlier. Well, with one exception—my Biology teacher, who also taught the combination course of Anatomy & Physiology/Marine Biology, was truly a gem. She was the teacher who stared us down, dumb-founded, when she learned that as freshmen, we had never in our lives had a single geography lesson, and not one of us could name all of the continents. She was the teacher who really took her job seriously, and set out, as much as was possible, to fill in major gaps in understanding, regardless of the subject.

My school was apparently not well funded. We didn’t have textbooks for any of the sciences or for history. We did however, have textbooks for foreign languages and math. These textbooks were old and worn, not a problem in and of itself, but I remember receiving a book that had belonged to one of my sisters nine or ten years earlier, and in the inside front cover, where kids used to list the condition of the book, she had listed it as having been in fair condition. Ten years of food spills, being tossed into lockers, and dropped on the floor, or otherwise abused, had rendered the condition of my copy as incredibly poor. Again, this was not a huge problem. I mean, at least I had a book. But as mentioned, I didn’t have textbooks for the sciences or for history. As a matter of fact, I had never had a history textbook in my life (i.e., up until college). Even in the seventh grade when I had a super enthusiastic history buff for a teacher, we didn’t have books. But that didn’t seem to make a difference. I learned more history in his class than I ever had.

Speaking of history, our state requires three social studies classes for high school graduation. Two of these must be U.S. History I and II. My own experience with high school history was a joke. The football coach taught our class by reading out of the only copy of the history book on hand. The text didn’t lend itself well for this and was so dry, that most of us would just zone out by paragraph four. From time to time, he’d pass out dittos for reference. And that was it. U.S. History II was an even bigger joke. This was one of the teachers who had just given up. He sat at his desk, with a newspaper in hand, and he’d take attendance. That was it, and I’m not even joking. It was quite literally a free study hall period. If you had attended most of the classes, you’d be exempt from the final. I was exempt. He went over what was to be on the final in one day, and that was to 1. List the presidents in order, and 2. List the presidents that were assassinated.

The sciences weren’t as bad. I do remember doing some science, although conceptually my understanding was limited, but was shocked later to learn that there should have been some math involved, particularly when studying Chemistry and Physics. I asked my husband if he remembered Algebra or Calculus based sciences, and he said that he didn’t either, so I’m sure my experience is not unique.

My math experience was horrendous. Algebra I was intuitive enough for me to figure things out on my own. Geometry wasn’t as easy for me. I don’t remember anything about my Trigonometry experience. Algebra II was confusing, and Calculus was impossible. My poor teacher was at a complete loss as to how to help me. When he’d complete writing out the solution to a problem on the board, I’d always say, “I don’t get it.” So he’d erase the entire thing and start all over again. But I still didn’t get it. And there was no Internet to come to the rescue. Obviously, there was some major foundational stuff I was missing. I knew I wasn’t uneducable, and yet I was struggling so much. At one point, after getting back countless calculus tests littered with question marks, the teacher asked to have a student-teacher conference. No parent-teacher conference was suggested, as by then, my Dad had already passed away, and my Mom didn’t understand English anyway. In any case, the teacher asked me,

“Patty, are you planning to go into any of the math or science fields?”

By the time he asked this question, I was sufficiently scared away by this idea, not to mention that I had had my heart set on studying English since the time I was nine years old. My reply of, “No,” seemed to ease his mind. He told me that he didn’t want to see my grade point average suffer, considering I was acing every other class, so he decided to pass me for this reason. And so I passed, but not really. I still feel awful about that. On the one hand, I’m glad I managed to look good on paper, but on the other hand, it just felt rotten to feel like I had just gotten a free pass. Calculus has been the thorn in my side ever since, but I am determined to figure it out, especially now that I’ve had the opportunity to relearn math from scratch. I figure that I should have covered all of the foundational stuff this time around. I hope?

Now, what I’m not mentioning in all of the above is that in addition to all of the issues discussed here, there were oh so many other things we had to deal with as students at this school, including, but not limited to, a whole host of inappropriate student-teacher relationships. At times it really felt as if the motivation to establish these “relationships” trumped the motivation to educate any of us. And I’d be lying if I said that this sort of stuff didn’t contribute at least in part to our decision to homeschool our children. It wasn’t THE reason, but it certainly crossed my mind from time to time.

As for high school today, I can’t tell for sure if or how things have changed. I do think that parents now wouldn’t tolerate a complete lack of textbooks, and generally, I think that parents are more prone to jump in and help their kids when they’re stuck. I keep hearing accounts of parents stating that their kids’ school projects turn out to be school projects for the parents. I don’t remember this ever being the case when I was a kid, but I don’t remember having a very project-heavy education either. My daughter has mentioned that in speaking to friends, she has noted that a lot of their education has been “excerpted.” When I asked her to elaborate, she mentioned that while her friends’ school reading lists sounded fairly impressive, that further discussion illuminated the fact that what they had read were excerpts of the literature, rather than complete novels, and that text books are often skimmed. This wasn’t altogether surprising for me, because I remember that sort of stuff happening when I was in school as well. But it’s easy to forget sometimes, particularly when you’re the one in charge of your child’s education. It’s very easy to set the bar way up high, and then feel like a failure when you haven’t accomplished every single thing you’ve set out to accomplish. And I don’t want to be the parent that says, “Well, they’re not doing as much in school anyway…” because well, I don’t really know what they’re doing, and part of me doesn’t really care. I didn’t set out to home educate my children just so that I could reproduce exactly what others were doing. And yet year after year, I find myself referencing guidelines, just to feel safe and secure that I’ve complied at least enough for us to have achieved equivalency…at least on paper. I know that what’s on paper however, is seldom far from the truth, and it’s hard to quantify my kids’ education in so shallow a manner. And to be fair, I don’t think other-schooled kids’ educations can be quantified this way either. It does make it convenient for the paper pushers though.