A Day in the Life of Public High School

A Day in the Life of Public High School

by Lisa VanDamme
VanDamme Academy
Aliso Viejo, California

One day last week, I picked up my son—a freshman at our highly regarded local public high school—and asked how his day had been. As usual, he just shrugged. Then he said, “I don’t know. It just feels like, after a long day at school, nothing has changed.”

Then we talked that feeling through. In his elementary and junior high years at VanDamme Academy, in every period of every day he felt like he was moving forward. He learned a few new vocabulary words, conquered a concept in grammar, discussed the next chapter in a classic book, heard about an important even in history, etc. But in high school, he feels like he just spends his day spinning in a circle.

Ultimately, he decided it seems like some kind of year-long summer camp. The teachers are kind and the kids are cooperative, but the “work” is almost always just some academic-ish activity meant to keep them busy.

As a freshman, he is enrolled in Honors Precalc, Honors English, Honors Biology, French, Wind Ensemble, and Cross Country. The school is on a “block schedule”, so here is a glimpse of an ordinary Friday.

6AM: Early Cross-Country practice.

7:11 – 8:20: Wind Ensemble practice.

8:30 – 10:01: Honors Biology. He spent thirty minutes labeling and coloring a picture of a cell. That was the only task for the day, so afterwards he had a full hour of idle time.

10:01 – 12:37: Honors English. They were to begin To Kill a Mockingbird. They “began” by watching a fifteen-minute Dr. Seuss cartoon with themes of discrimination. Then they were asked to read a few articles establishing context for the book. They were put in groups and given ciphers to uncover a code in the articles (e.g., the first letter in the fifteenth word in article one). The first group to crack the code was awarded Starburst candies. (The team that didn’t read the articles and prioritized the code-breaking won.)

12:37 – 1:22: Lunch

1:22 – 3:18: French. He arrived prepared to take a quiz on some simple French vocabulary. But the teacher decided to postpone the quiz, and they instead spent the period playing Bingo with the words he already knew.

I have spoken to many other VanDamme Academy graduates who give the same report: they list the countless art projects that filled their academic classes and reflect on how much of their time feels more like games than scholarship. But not all of them are complaining. Some, it breaks my heart to say, just call it “fun,” or say the social life of school is satisfaction enough.

Ironically, it reminds me of a line from To Kill a Mockingbird, a book I teach in seventh grade and love so much I know it almost by heart. Scout, an early reader and eager learner, laments how disappointing school, in the grips of progressive pedagogy, turned out to be. Her days, she says, were “an endless Project that slowly evolved into a Unit, in which miles of construction paper and wax crayon were expended by the State of Alabama in its well-meaning but fruitless efforts to teach me Group Dynamics.”

It is sad. My son really loves participating in the cross-country team. There, they move forward.

But in the classroom, he finds himself mostly spinning in a circle.