To My Son's Middle School

Dear Middle School,

We believe in public education. That is one of the reasons we decided to keep our son enrolled in you rather than putting him in the fancy private school in the next town over. Public education is a public good. It is good for democracy. It is good to interact with a variety of different folks, not just the kind who can afford $13000 for the opportunity to attend year sixth grade.

But I think we need to talk. It wasn't cool how the music room had a bulletin board that talked about all of the various languages in which songs are written: Latin, French, German, Italian, Japanese, and African. African? Where is this weird orientalism coming from? Public education isn't supposed to otherize people like that. Public education shouldn't be in the business of that kind of ignorance. It's especially ironic, since Africans probably speak, on average, more languages than the rest of us. (As a side note, yes, they are languages. Let's please stop talking about how white people speak languages and black people speak dialects. That's racist, isn't it? Also, when an African language is mentioned, can white people please resist the impulse immediately to ask about whether it is one of those "clicking" languages?) How can an educated person look at a poster like that, every day for 180-some-odd days, and still not take it down? It makes me concerned.

It wasn't cool that you told us "chorus and some other stuff" when we asked you what "Music 6" means. When we inquired about the "other stuff" you couldn't really come up with anything, which also wasn't cool. Given the poor condition of the arts in our public education system, couldn't you at least have been sufficiently prepared and professional to have a sense of what you will be teaching in just a few days?
It's not cool how my son will not have had a history course after two years of you. No history? This is why my students think Columbo discovered the United States in 1776 while sailing the Mayflower. I'm glad he got half a year of geography last year, and that half a year of "social studies" is on the agenda for this year (although you had no interest-- or was it ability?-- to tell us what this means).

It really wasn't cool how you said Language Arts will consist of students writing creative stories during the beginning of class and then will read quietly at the end of class. That sounds like babysitting. When we asked you about whether our son would learn grammar and how to diagram a sentence, you said that 6th graders already know that stuff, which wasn't cool, because they don't. Heck, my college seniors don't know that stuff. Probably because you and your kin don't teach it anymore. And I bet that if I had asked you to describe what an indirect object pronoun is, you couldn't have done it. Which means you can't diagram a sentence either. Which means that foreign language learning is that much harder in college. Which means all of the awesome stuff that foreign language learning does for people is that much harder to come by. Because people can't diagram sentences and aren't learning in middle school what a past participle is.

It wasn't cool how the flyer you gave us had multiple spelling and grammatical errors, and how the schedule you gave our son had multiple errors as well.
I understand that it is a genuine challenge to do a good job when almost half of your students do not speak much English at home. I understand that it is difficult when 65% of your students qualify for free or reduced lunch. I understand that you are dealing with so many discipline problems that diagramming sentences seems like a pipe dream. It's hard for schools to do what they need to do when the home is having a hard time doing what it needs to do. And I'm excited about the new Foreign Language teacher who will be teaching French, Spanish, Italian and Dutch. Dutch? How cool is that? How many other middle schools are doing that? Is that one of those clicking dialects?

I don't mean to sound sour. Education is just so important, for the survival of our democracy, for our happiness as human beings.

Sincerely,

Concerned Parent