This is WooHoo Day:

Some months ago, my boys and I came up with the idea that they could each have one totally free, school-skippin' day a year.  WooHoo Day, we called it.  This past Wednesday, waking to a glorious sunny spring day, they cashed in on this promise.  After dropping Birtie at her little morning preschool, the boys and I went to breakfast.  We drank honeybush tea and ate fried eggs and bacon at a little downtown cafe.  We went to the creek and threw dandelions in the water, racing them down the rapids, watching their little sunny heads pop up beneath the foam.  The boys climbed a steep rock face and slid down a dirt bank, huge puffs of dust billowing behind them.  While I was watching them scale this thirty-foot rock wall for the fifth time, I realized that, at that moment, Corin's class was sitting down to their MAPs testing - Measures of Academic Progress standardized tests.   "Well, OOPS!," I thought, "I didn't plan that well."  But then I shrugged.  There's always another standardized test around the corner, but there's not always a spring day like this.  "WooHoo Day 2014!" I shouted up to them.  "WooHoo Day!" they yelled back.  "WooHoo Day is a learning day for the heart," I called back, putting my signature mom veneer on their experiences and trying to shake off my lingering guilt about the MAPS test.  They didn't answer but kept climbing toward the cliff top where a patch of yellow arrow-leaf balsam-roots sunnily leaned over the rock face, exhorting them on.     

    
So let's talk about this for a moment -- it's a great example of an ambivalence that plagues me.  I don't know what I think about school for my boys.  Or let me rephrase that, I think many conflicting things about school for my boys.

First let me start with some important background facts: I love school.  I came from a family of educators, devoted to the life of the mind, the opportunity for education, and the importance of working to keep a robust public sphere.  That's my "on-the-one-hand."  On the other hand, my boys are dyslexic.  Often, they write their bs like ds, they spell completely phonetically, they approximate words as they read and rely heavily on context clues, they regularly get directions wrong because they aren't able to read them closely enough, and, consistently, they under-perform on standardized tests.  I don't know about your public schools, but in ours, standardized tests seem to have a kudzu-like vigor.  They're popping up everywhere.  There's MAPS and Dibels and Smarter-Balanced Testing.  And they come around again and again.  At our parent-teacher conferences, Tim and I are shown graphs of each boy's MAPS and Dibels tests, and each trimester we're told how close they were to making bench-mark this time.  Well, shoot, he's almost there.  "But," they invariably tell us, "your son is very bright, his comprehension is amazing.  He's thinking on a different level than so many of his classmates."  

Now, I mean no sleight on the very fine teachers who my boys have been blessed to have.  These teachers are working within the parameters they are given.  And those parameters just happen to include lots of measurements.  I'm not advocating that there shouldn't be such testing, I'm agnostic on all that.  Despite being raised by a gifted public education crusader, I really don't have a reformatory bone in my body.  What I am, is a mom with two boys for whom the right schooling answer isn't obvious.

So, while Corin's classmates bent over their keyboards to answer their MAPS tests, here's what my boys did:
Throw rocks in the creek
Catch a snake
Get incredibly dirty
Talk about Quest Narratives, walking arm-in-arm with their mother
Hear hundreds of bird calls
Look for an American Kestrel
Feel the breeze on their faces, ditto the sunlight
Cross the creek on a log
Send scores of dandelion blooms downstream
Smell the cottonwood bud-bursts 

Though I believe whole-heartedly in their value, it's hard to measure what these things add to our lives.  I hold fast to the idea that through the dialectic of experience and thinking, our ways of knowing gain in nuance and texture.  I want to raise life-long learners who are curious about the world around them.  I want to raise children that see with the eyes of their hearts - to use a Pauline phrase - more than I want to raise children that can add fractions (though of course I'd like them to be able to add fractions as well, and spell "phonetically" without beginning it with an f).  The lesson plan for that first kind of learning is far more challenging than the one for the latter.     

Education is a gift and a privilege and many, many children don't have the schooling opportunities I am so blithely letting my children cast aside in order to WooHoo.  But I also believe that education takes many forms.  And just as factual knowledge furnishes our minds with certain ways of knowing, there's a whole world of truth that is not comprised in fact.  That's the sort of truth that one approaches by listening to bird calls and throwing rocks in the creek and watching dandelions spin in the current.  It's the sort of truth that rustles in the grass when one releases a snake back among the blades.  It's the sort of truth that makes one's heart thrill while discussing quest narratives and walking arm-in-arm beneath the bursting cottonwoods with your mother. 

Corin, no doubt, will have to make up his MAPS testing.  And when we get his end-of-trimester report, that little data set will tell us something we're supposed to hail as a measure of his learning.  No doubt it will be a hair below benchmark, but, shoot, so close.  As always, I will try to take the long view when we get this little graph.  Afterall, I'm raising life long learners, curious and imaginative, who know how to see with the eyes of their hearts - not an ability that will ever be measurable by MAPS or Dibels or Smarter-Balanced Testing.  Can I get a  WooHoo?