It’s not a school day…

My youngest son’s favorite whine/cry/scream when he doesn’t want to go to school..  “But it’s not a school day!” 

Yes, actually it is.

The problem with having kids is that I have a good memory.  I remember what *I* used to think as a kid.

I’m also grown-up enough to know how incredibly wrong I was as a kid.

Bottom line – school is a necessity…  I didn’t think so when I was a kid, I dropped out of high-school after failing out of my second Freshman year, not because I couldn’t do the work, but because I didn’t want to.  (I got an A in every class I attended, I just usually only attended 1 out of 5 of them.)

But school SHOULD be fun.  Maybe the problem is that every idiotic standardized test, designed to rob schools of funding based on some arbitrary measure of how good they are doing as a school, ends up becoming the curriculum.  “Teaching to the test” they call it.  They’ve forgotten that part of “school” is to teach kids to THINK, and to LEARN, and to LOVE LEARNING.

I was lucky.  When i was a kid I had a talent for working with computers, even back then.  When I was 14 and minimum wage was $3.25 an hour, I had summer jobs paying $10-$12 an hour (cash because I was too young to work back then)  Even though I had some rough spots I’ve been consistently employed now since 1994, through two recessions, never more than two weeks between jobs, and all without a college degree.

My son, 14, whose grades I usually rave about, has no such talent.  He thinks that playing Call of Duty somehow is going to qualify him for a job, not realizing that those skills don’t exactly transfer over to the real world – Special Ops commando’s don’t get issued half-pound bags of Twizzlers and Monster Energy Drinks before every mission.

He’s brilliantly smart, but also exceptionally lazy.  If we let him he’d stay in bed until noon, come down and raid the fridge, then go downstairs and plug into the playstation for the remainder of the day.  (Actually if he had his way he’d have a fridge and a PS3 in his room and we’d never see him.)

So how do you convince a kid that that D in math *IS* in fact a big deal, and that this is HIGH SCHOOL, where from here on out everything counts.

You can continue to hold things over his head.  You can continue to threaten, beg, cajole, ask nicely, scream, etc.

But that just gets them doing it in SPITE of what they want to do.  My question is, how do you get them to WANT to do it.  I know it’s possible, I’ve met kids before who are excited about school, for whom learning is something they really enjoy.

I wasn’t one of them, and so far non of my kids are either.  They will eventually figure it out too, I’m just hoping it’s not too late by the time they do.