the voke
my mother is one of those people who stubbornly clings to traditional (i.e. badly prejudiced) perspectives on education. her response to the news that one of my children would be attending the voke this year was more than passively/aggressively critical, and it made my skin crawl to hear "live" the voice that shaped my own formative educational years. (i will write more some day about the effect such parental attitudes, common in the bizarre w-town world in which i grew up, had on those around me, but not too soon, because the stories are extremely emotionally difficult to tell, involving, as they do, teenage suicides and other tragedies). at least i can say i value being able to hear it for what it is now, ("know thyself" are indeed words to live by), but the ire and defensiveness i feel for my child is striking to me. (guy's got issues--what can i say).
anyway, by way of background, suffice it to say that a year ago, the academic reports were dire. multiple class grades were on the verge of failure, and the student's expressions of deathly boredom and frustration were daily. don't get me wrong--i'm proud of the remarkable effort it took to salvage the year's grades to enable passing--and not least among the motivators was having a chance to apply to the voke the next year. (yeah, i played the parental passive/aggressive game--"if you don't pass, you can't qualify for the voke"). well, not only did it work, but let me tell you about the ride home from the halloween party this year and a few other things.
i don't know what you used to talk to your dad about being driven home from a saturday night party back in the day, but how excited you were about your classes in school was not something i would have expected to get into, myself. but there i was hearing about everything from the hot shit cool stuff they got into in the robotics shop, and why it was even better than the electronics and computer and engineering shops, (because you got all three and more all in one), to the earnest and eager resolve to ask the math teacher for extra projects, because it wasn't challenging enough as it is.
!!!
i know one thing about education, and that's that you only learn what you want to learn, and here's a kid who all of a sudden wants to learn it all. his academics are, right now, from his midterm progress report, all A's, and there's no reason to expect they'll ever dip from there throughout the rest of his academic career. my mom will, of course, grind her teeth and only half-swallow the bitter excuse that those courses couldn't possibly be as rigorous, and i only hope i'm not there to hear it, or hear of it, because i'm sitting on a powderkeg of love and pride for that child (who is now hardly one at all) to which not even feelings for my own mother could ever compare, and my response will hardly satisfy my god-squadding sister's constant admonitions to "honor". (where's the commandment to love all children unconditionally, and grandchildren too, for that matter, that's what i want to know).
i'm proud of being a voke parent, and my only regret is never having had the opportunity back in the day to consider it for myself. (i tried once to sign up for auto shop, which i still regret never attending to this day, and the guidance counsellor at double-you high school forbade it, arguing that such things were not for "college preparation".
WTF
a college degree is often the millstone around the neck of countless kids who are bearing the brunt of this "recovery" that comes complete without any jobs for so many of them. knowing what you love to do, and what you are good at, and then having the preparation to learn it so you can do it well, is the key to a productive and happy life--of this i am more certain today than i've ever been. i wish i were a musician. i wish i were an auto mechanic. i wish i were an electrical engineer. someday, maybe, if i'm lucky, i might become one of them, or two, or, dare i dream, three. but, until that day, i know i am going to be happy because i've seen that joy in the face of my child, and i know he is going to be OK.
anyway, by way of background, suffice it to say that a year ago, the academic reports were dire. multiple class grades were on the verge of failure, and the student's expressions of deathly boredom and frustration were daily. don't get me wrong--i'm proud of the remarkable effort it took to salvage the year's grades to enable passing--and not least among the motivators was having a chance to apply to the voke the next year. (yeah, i played the parental passive/aggressive game--"if you don't pass, you can't qualify for the voke"). well, not only did it work, but let me tell you about the ride home from the halloween party this year and a few other things.
i don't know what you used to talk to your dad about being driven home from a saturday night party back in the day, but how excited you were about your classes in school was not something i would have expected to get into, myself. but there i was hearing about everything from the hot shit cool stuff they got into in the robotics shop, and why it was even better than the electronics and computer and engineering shops, (because you got all three and more all in one), to the earnest and eager resolve to ask the math teacher for extra projects, because it wasn't challenging enough as it is.
!!!
i know one thing about education, and that's that you only learn what you want to learn, and here's a kid who all of a sudden wants to learn it all. his academics are, right now, from his midterm progress report, all A's, and there's no reason to expect they'll ever dip from there throughout the rest of his academic career. my mom will, of course, grind her teeth and only half-swallow the bitter excuse that those courses couldn't possibly be as rigorous, and i only hope i'm not there to hear it, or hear of it, because i'm sitting on a powderkeg of love and pride for that child (who is now hardly one at all) to which not even feelings for my own mother could ever compare, and my response will hardly satisfy my god-squadding sister's constant admonitions to "honor". (where's the commandment to love all children unconditionally, and grandchildren too, for that matter, that's what i want to know).
i'm proud of being a voke parent, and my only regret is never having had the opportunity back in the day to consider it for myself. (i tried once to sign up for auto shop, which i still regret never attending to this day, and the guidance counsellor at double-you high school forbade it, arguing that such things were not for "college preparation".
WTF
a college degree is often the millstone around the neck of countless kids who are bearing the brunt of this "recovery" that comes complete without any jobs for so many of them. knowing what you love to do, and what you are good at, and then having the preparation to learn it so you can do it well, is the key to a productive and happy life--of this i am more certain today than i've ever been. i wish i were a musician. i wish i were an auto mechanic. i wish i were an electrical engineer. someday, maybe, if i'm lucky, i might become one of them, or two, or, dare i dream, three. but, until that day, i know i am going to be happy because i've seen that joy in the face of my child, and i know he is going to be OK.
posted by kad barma at 10:52 AM
3 Comments:
Congrats to your kid, and there's nothing at all wrong with a voke route to adulthood. I'm the proud daughter of a vocational-educated father, and he has spent his life working with his hands and making a good living. He insisted my brother and I "do something better" ie go to college, but both of us were suited to it and I suspect that if one of us had found a calling to do something else he would have been all right with that. Certainly, I wish a LOT of the time I had half his skills working with mechanical/electrical/carpentry - though I do have to say I at least inherited his innate ability to "do things." (Sans electrical, which I know well enough not to touch!)
Someone has to be out there, engineering/making/building things the rest of us can't do!
The other irony is that the MCAS scores at the voke support the notion that these kids are as capable to go to college as any of the mainstreamers, and, indeed, a good many of them do. (He got his back recently, and he's "advanced" in everything). I like it best that he has more choices in his life now, not less, and the choices are better suited to who he is, and not who his grandmother or anybody else thinks he should be. If I were betting, I'd be betting he's going to want to go on for more engineering education after HS. It's remarkable how rabid he is for it all now.
Many of the 8th graders at Saint Michael's proudly move up to the Voke too. I wish I could say something better about Catholic high schools, but I'm not impressed at all. Took a tour of my husband's all boys Catholic college prep, while I was looking forward to it I was very disappointing at it now . It was a glorified finishing school at 17k at year, that boasts the matriculation rates of colleges of their recent alumni. For 17k a year, I want my child to have a PhD at 18, not a high school diploma.
Teenagers are capable of much more, they should be doing not prepping.
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