Agenda

I had an interesting, if unsettling, discussion with my daughter and a friend of hers this evening. The topic was 'how do you keep track of what's due in school'.

In the first year of middle school, the kids are issued an agenda book (a new one is handed out each year). It has spaces for making note of homework, projects, upcoming tests, and occasional reminders, suggestions, exhortations, and such. The school is VERY big on these -- the kids are not allowed to be seen in the hall, as a rule, unless they have the agenda book with them. In the presentations to the parents, the school administration pumps the idea of 'personal responsibility', using the phrase 'it is the student's responsibility' many, many times. Its the classic 'do this now, because in high school...'

My daughter isn't a great scheduler. She thinks she's pretty good, and possibly from the sound of things, she might be, at least relative to her class. But I worry about whether she's truly on track, and episodes like tonight, where she broke down almost to tears because she won't have a project done -- apparently, she and the kid she's paired with simply can't synch schedules -- don't do much to assuage that fear. So I wondered: does the school do anything to reinforce use of the book? Encourage effective use of the book? Provide backup systems for those who aren't using it effectively? Frankly, I doubted it. I didn't doubt that the administration means what it says, and I didn't doubt that such a system could work -- but I wondered if it really did, and if it didn't --because, hey, how many people bought The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? How many of them actually read it all? And of them, applied it? And of them, more than a few weeks? -- if it didn't work, was there a backup system?

So I asked both of them -- my daughter, who's in eighth grade, and her friend, who's in ninth. And they both said the same thing. Yes, the school gets very tense if they don't have it. Yes, they tell you 'put this in your agenda book'. But -- no, they don't check, even occasionally, unless theres a clear problem. No, they don't always give you time to grab the book and write out what they said. No, there's no backup to see if its being used effectively. And, the high schooler added, they don't really care. Really? I said. Or is it just that they have too much to do anyway? She shrugged.

Well, crap, I can hear teachers say. You think we have the time to hand-hold your child? We're doing good to get through all of the stuff that we have to do every day. We hit the buzzwords we're supposed to hit, and thats all we have time to do. And I think, true enough. Thats not their job. On the other hand, I don't know whats happening in school, except generally, and I don't know what the expectations are. So it sounds like we have this tool which is probably being used effectively, but we -- or at least I --don't actually know that.

And I find that unsettling. What to DO about it is a whole 'nother question.