Students Deserve An Education That Inspires Them

I am a late blooming academic. So tardy, in fact, that my learning fire wasn’t ignited until my senior year of college. (One inspiring professor in a seminar-level class gets extra credit.)

I occasionally berate myself for not paying heed and riding the momentum of that overdue intellectual insight. I should have pursued an immediate graduate degree, but my priority was breaking away from a commuter’s life at an unduly oppressive home.

At the time, despite my newfound love of learning, if anyone ever told me that someday I would feel assured in my abilities to home school my child, I would have scoffed. I would have figured this was best left to the bookish, 4.0 students who breezed through their studies and their childhoods.

But for some reason, with my belated independence and then Zach, I gained newfound determination and also confidence in my ability to teach.  I wanted to impart what I wished I had been taught in my primary and secondary school years, where I often felt strapped behind a miniature desk, staring up at the clock’s red second-hand, while a didactic Charlie Brown teacher garbled on in full drone.

It’s not that I didn’t learn. I got the fundamentals. But my pedestrian education lacked a vision on the part of my instructors. It was like a piece-meal offering that added up to one tedious year after another. No continuity, no big picture, no reason for making the grade other than to get to the 12-year-finish line.

What I refer to is what many of my public school teaching friends complain about even today; little time devoted to instilling a love of learning. And practically zero time allocated to delving into a specific subject.  Dabbling is the way of public education, as it has been for years.

School schedules don’t allow the student who craves or needs more to get hooked. And now, with academic assessment through state standardized testing and reporting, many of my teacher friends bitterly resent the rote learning and scant information they are forced to offer just to be accountable.

I guess deficiencies often lead to growth, and ultimately, change. I realize now that the unpredictable patterns of my childhood home life, coupled with my bland education, derailed my zest to learn. But they also set the wheels in motion for me to become an adult passionate enough about planting the seed of knowledge to become a home school mom, doing for my child what wasn’t done for me.

From my fatalistic viewpoint, I decided to home school Zach to hopefully improve, in more ways than one.

Obviously, public education also has issues because the recurring discussion about revamping the system takes a turn with each presidential administration. And according to the White House Internet page on education, President Obama is no exception. One of his top priorities is education reform.

So maybe as with all things, time will play itself out, and eventually there will be one overriding catalyst that shakes things up enough to transform the pedagogical approach to mass learning and provide students what they deserve: A worthy, inspirational education.