Possibly the biggest fear I experienced in the elementary grades was in doing anything academic from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Before schools began tacking on extra days to the calendar, for “in-service” days, our summers were free.
Now, the school year often starts in early August and stretches into June. Hey, where’d our summers go?
I must have slept through the grammar units at Immaculate Conception School, taught by Sister Maria Nominativa Predicata. Once, when I blew it on my turn to walk that green mile to the board to diagram a sentence — did we ever do anything but diagram sentences in that class? — I tilted the line that signals a prepositional phrase in the wrong direction.
“You look like a good candidate for summer school, Arthur,” the teacher declared. My feelings were mixed: on the one hand, she’d never placed “good” within 10 words of a description of me; on the other hand, I became contrite as I dreaded the loss of Heaven and the pains of summer school.
Two particularly obstreperous classmates, Liz and Olivia, answered my question about summer school as I walked them all the way to their houses on the south end of Commerce Street for a real show-and-tell.
They pointed to a hot, wooden frame structure on Commerce Street that must have resulted after a failed bond issue. The all-wood structure had a bad odor, lacked paint, and had windows that sometimes closed. Liz told me that if I were to attend summer school there and still not cut the rigors of academe, “el maestro te manda al infierno.
The threat almost convinced me that Señor Ogre really had the power, upon looking at my test scores, to convey me to the nether regions, where I’d burn for eternity.
Liz was so convincing that I almost visualized a lever that the summer school teacher would activate to send me on a no-wait one-way trip to the depths. Now, many years later, I applaud Liz and Olivia for their creative way of frightening me. But at the time, I feared having to give up a summer of riding bikes and selling Optics, in lieu of an 8-to-5 regimen where we who didn’t cut it during the regular school year had nothing but time — to diagram more sentences.
Report cards, at least in those days, contained blanks indicating whether a student had been promoted or retained. My brother, Severino, intimidated me by saying that the following year the report cards — only for my grade — would have yet another option, a demotion. So if I’m in third grade now, next year I’ll regress to second, and the year after, the first grade? By that logic, I could become a teen kindergartener.
I must remember some day to repay my much-older brother.
But back to school. Even in those days, I believed much of a student’s progress depended on the luck of the draw, the kind of teacher one had. Remember, that most elementary students have the same teacher all year. Most were good; others gave us bouts of narcolepsy.
Though I never got the dreaded news that I’d been retained, the threat of that eventuality kept me cautious. I often wondered about the stigma of retention. Would I be thrilled at being told by last year’s classmates, “Hey, dummy. How come you’re a grade behind us now?” One day, in seventh grade, our teacher asked us all to wish our classmate, Andres, a happy 17th birthday. Wow! He’s on course to graduate at 22, if he sticks with it.
Nobody razzed him about being the only junior high kid who needed to shave or think about registering for the draft. Of course, when you’re five years older than your classmates, you don’t get a lot of ribbing anyway.
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A frightening prospect is currently in the works regarding the end of social promotion. Gov. Susana Martinez’s sought-after policy will retain any third-grader who is unable to read at grade level.
Have the architects of this plan really thought out the ramifications?
First, there are some kids who will never read at grade level. Some come to school hungry, or having been nourished only on a Pop Tart and a Big Gulp. Others bring with them a multitude of familial problems, which suddenly, in the 21st century, schools are supposed to fix.
The reasons for being unable to reach that magic reading-level ring are manifold. We need to stop thinking of education as part of that archetypal midwestern Utopia, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking and all the children are above average.
No, the reality is that we simply don’t know why some kids can’t cut it. Will retention depend on a single test score? How much teacher subjectivity will factor in? And we need to realize that as important as reading is, a school year is more than just reading.
Imagine Johnny being kept in the third grade because his SBA scores were low. So — in the event he decided not to run away from home — he repeats third grade.
But wait! Third grade contains art and music lessons, and P.E. It might include units in geography and social studies and of course math. But Johnny’s already performed adequately in these subjects. It’s his low performance in reading that’s requiring him to spend an entire year reviewing and repeating. Even a summer of intense remediation seems more desirable than repeating an entire year.
The no-social-promotion plan appears to be gaining momentum. The state’s education-secretary-designee, Hanna Skandera, estimates there are 4,000 likely candidates for a second helping of third grade.
The issue is far too complicated to simply be rubber-stamped and made into law without considering the many facets of what it takes to educate people.
This column will contain much more on this subject in the coming weeks.