Those Days

 I don't remember hating school. 

I can remember being anxious about going to school. 

I don't remember faking being sick.

I can remember exaggerating my symptoms to get an extra day of ginger ale and crackers in bed. 

These days I work in a business that is built around kids not hating school. I don't want kids coming to school when they are truly "infirma," but attendance on Mondays and Fridays suggest that maybe moms and dads aren't as inquisitive as to their children's health as my mom was. 

On the one hand, we have a funding issue in which the filled seats help fund our school. Coercing kids who don't have a strong urge to be one of those seat fillers to show up for recess with their friends is a real thing. Finding the reason not to hate school is the challenge. 

On the other hand, since that's what the metaphor insists, there is the responsibility to keep the customer satisfied. If being at school has become drudgery, it could be that competing with the world of TikTok and all things found on cell phones is not a fair challenge. 

To wit: During a week of standardized testing that is done primarily on school Chromebooks, I chose to open up the vaults a bit when classes came to the computer lab for their regularly scheduled Media Arts Class. I told them that I had no specific plan for them and that they could choose from one of the dozens of applications found on our school's web sign-in page. This came as a direct response to the number of requests I field over the course of a year being asked if we could do this instead of that. 

Given this wide berth, most of the kids went after those things that had been out of rotation for most of the year. They found things to enjoy. To work at. But in each class, there were at least a few voices of dissent: "Can't we do YouTube?" Not on the menu. "Can't we do Kahoot?" Not on the menu. 

If you give a mouse a cookie, they'll want to stay in bed and have crackers and ginger ale brought to them. 

While they stare at YouTube.