A glimpse into the abyss

My daughters have been very pestiferous this past week.  If I leave it at that you, or they, will scurry to the googly dictionary and have to wonder what I'm talking about - are they sick or annoying?  Wweeelllllll........sick.  They've had the same illness for the past 9-10 days.  Child 1 had it first, passed it on to Child 3, who now has shared it with Child 2, who announced her turn with a morning text that informed me "I don't feel good."  Now, had they all been feeling fine (a rarity, it seems) for a week and I called them pestiferous....they occasionally earn that adjective, too.

How in the world do we ever master the English language?  An old question, an unanswerable question, but the question on my mind tonight and most days when I work with kids who are struggling to learn reading.  Pestiferous is but a drop in the ocean of backwards spellings, phonetic rules that only sometimes apply, multiple meaning words, homophones/homographs/homonyms, silent letters.  Again I ask, how is it possible to learn, to teach, this stuff efficiently and effectively?

I've stood in classrooms for ten hours over the last three school days, watching third through sixth grade students take the yearly MCA tests on reading.  All students in each grade take these tests so Big Brother can decide whether or not the students are being educated.  It's a horrible, wasteful, pointless process.  Any teacher that works with these kids day after day can tell in an instant what the test will tell after making the kids sit and stare at a screen for hours.  Kids with a talent for language will excel, kids with language and reading difficulties have no chance.  Not only do we put them through the test instead of using that time to help them improve, we spend the weeks leading up to the test prepping them for it.  Not teaching, prepping.

America's education system is nothing more than a flaming vessel with a broken rudder spinning circles in the middle of an ocean, too flawed for progress, not taking on water fast enough to ever completely sink.

Geez, this entry took a dark turn in a hurry, didn't it?  If you've read this blog long enough you'll notice I don't write much about education anymore, despite the title.  It's tough to stay positive towards such a dysfunctional mess, so I now try to stay quiet.  What happened above is what always happens anymore if I try to talk or write about education - I turn ugly.  The way our education system fails its clients, and has for decades, is a travesty.  There's nothing more to say.