What did you learn at school today?
Generations of children have not answered that question. Perhaps the phrasing isn’t quite right. “Learning” is, after all, an ephemeral thing, and also a process, making it hard for anyone, especially a small child, to pin it down and describe. But when my child began her journey through public schooling last fall, I, like all parents before me, wanted to know what she was doing during those six long hours in the classroom.
So I asked, “What did you learn at school today?” “Nothing,” was her succinct and perhaps accurate response.
So I tried, “What did you do at school today?” Her typical response was, “Stuff.” So I attempted to be more specific, asking about lunchtime and recess and what movie they had watched in the computer lab, the only things I could be sure she had actually “done” during the school day. And she would go into detail, about playing Elsa on the playground, about watching part of the Lego Movie in the computer lab, about how she got a Class Dojo “point” for being extra quiet in the hallway.
But no matter what I tried, I couldn’t get answers about the “learning” or the “doing.” Those other five hours of the day were a fog that she couldn’t translate. Asking about specific subjects led nowhere. Apparently they didn’t categorize their activities that way. So I asked about what she had done with letters or numbers or whatever social studies or science topic I gleaned from their homework that they were covering. The response was always the same, “We did a worksheet.”
And so, after three quarters of the year, I finally hit on the magic question—the one query that would elicit a description of not only the content she had worked on but also the methods used to cover it—What worksheets did you do today?
What worksheets did you do today?
She could describe the worksheets—what they were about, what tasks she had to perform, whether she had used pencils or crayons, what errors she had made, and what she had done well. Once I started asking about the worksheets, I got all the answers I wanted from my daughter. But now I have a few questions for her teachers…and all of my fellow educators…
Why does a five-year-old only know how to describe her school day in terms of worksheets? Why do I hear about “tracing” worksheets and “living vs. non-living” worksheets and “adding” worksheets and “letter matching” worksheets and on and on and on? Why do I never hear about how she used beads or Unifix cubes or her own body to practice adding or skip counting? Why do I not hear about how she took a walk around the school to point out all the living and non-living things in her environment? Where are the manipulatives, the songs and story times, the kinesthetic activities, the experiments? Where is the art, the creativity, the social/emotional development, the cooperative learning? Some of these things do infrequently happen (usually around a holiday), but the daily business of “learning” and “doing” appears to have been reduced to what can be accomplished with a writing implement and a sheet of copy paper. The learning environment has shrunk to 8 ½ x 11-inches.
What worksheets did you do today?
I know why this happens (and I know that it doesn’t happen everywhere). Some of these worksheets are part of packaged curriculum programs and her teacher is required to use them. Some of them are a way to occupy one group of students while the teacher works with another. Some of them are completely valid and necessary teaching tools. But most of them are just a way to keep my child quiet, her hands busy even as her mind dulls. It’s easy to print out a worksheet and tell the children to work silently. It’s harder to design and deliver a lesson on the states of matter that plays to multiple intelligences. Or maybe it’s not. Maybe we educators are just afraid of what could happen when children use their hands and minds for something other than bubbling in the right answer choice. There could be noise. There could be a mess. There could be questions to which we don’t know the answer. And there could be children curious and engaged, problem-solving, applying concepts, making connections, and exploring their worlds. All excited to tell their families exactly what they learned and did at school today.
What worksheets did you do today?
My four-year-old started pre-K ready and excited to learn. My five-year-old is ending pre-K convinced that she hates school because school is about worksheets and silence. It’s about one-right-answer and staying in the lines (on paper and in the hallway), and being a “good” student means being “quiet.” This is the exact opposite of everything most of us know about what school should be like, either from the avalanches of educational research we’ve read or simply in our guts.
What worksheets did you do today?
Please fellow teachers, help me change the question.
Educating for Social Justice 