Three Dispatch stories on education caught my eye this week: the
first, the news that GUSD teachers only receive $50 for classroom
supplies; they pay for anything extra that they feel they need.
Three Dispatch stories on education caught my eye this week: the first, the news that GUSD teachers only receive $50 for classroom supplies; they pay for anything extra that they feel they need.
My immediate response was, “Dang! I wish someone would give me $50 for classroom supplies!” My in-house economic analyst brought me back to reality.
“Homeschooling is our choice,” he said sternly. “Public school expenditures are entirely different. Fifty dollars for classroom supplies is absurd; they need at least $500. They need classroom supplies more than they need a superintendent. They should fire Edwin Diaz and divvy up his salary to pay for supplies.”
The second story was about local veterinarian Dennis Harrigan, who brought his bone collection to Luigi Aprea School to the astonishment and delight of the second graders.
And the third was like unto it: OpenGATE, a group of parents of Gifted and Talented identified students, has applied for a $10,000 grant to help fund theater arts, primarily at Rucker School, the theater program of which was severely cut this year.
My reaction to both these stories was mingled admiration and sorrow: admiration that veterinarians and parents and classroom teachers give so of their time and resources to try to bring art and science into the classroom, sorrow that students warehoused in institutions have so little exposure to the art and science so abundant in the real world.
Being homeschoolers, we naturally do not have veterinarians bringing us their bone collections, or parent groups soliciting $10,000 grants for us. Instead, depending on our ages and interest levels, we take classes or collect things, go on field trips or work as docents, go to plays or act in plays.
This week, coincidentally, Anne and I went on two field trips, the first to see Gavilan College Theater’s “A Christmas Carol.” Gav had scheduled performances for school groups on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:30 am. They realized belatedly that school groups would be scarce on November 11th, as schools were closed for Veteran’s Day.
Fortunately, two of the cast members are homeschoolers (and at least one teenaged cast member is an ex-homeschooler, and one adult cast member is an ex-homeschooling mother – but I digress.) The mother of the homeschoolers put the word out, and about 40 of us found the time to go.
The play, starring visiting artist Jim Cave as Scrooge, was sheer delightful Dickens from the opening line: “Marley was dead to begin with,” to the closing “God bless us every one!” Julianne Crofts Palma directs the play as it should be directed: as a spooky Christmas ghost story about the triumph of the Christmas spirit of generosity over greed.
Family shows will be Dec. 3, 4, 10, and 11 at 7:30pm. Call 846-4973 for more information or visit www.gavilan.edu/theater/.
Our second field trip of the week came about because Kim is an overachiever. Not content with merely arranging a field trip for our 15 nature science kids to the Monterey Bay Aquarium, she threw it open, first to our local South Valley Homeschoolers Association, then to Bay Area Homeschoolers Field Trips. Over 100 of us converged on the Aquarium.
Anne and three of her biology classmates and I arrived late, straight from biology. Unfortunately, the bat ray petting pool and shore bird exhibits are closed for renovation, but we enjoyed the rest of our old favorites, the sea otters and the jelly fish and the kelp forest, as much as ever.
We also made the acquaintance of a baby great white shark. Great white sharks do not exist in captivity, because they refuse to eat. This one doesn’t know that; she gobbles up her salmon and mackerel as insouciantly and indiscriminately as if she were still on the bounding main.
The Aquarium plans to keep her in the Deep Sea tank and study her either until she stops eating, at which time they will have to release her, or until she starts eating the other fish in the exhibit, at which time they will have to make other arrangements.
