Why did we do it, what is it that we do not say out loud but everyone knows, even though they would not admit it under torture? How could we do it? Demoralize the little ones so much, hurt them so much, distort those small, pure souls so much? You even took those tests with your child in religion class, didn’t you?
And the teachers really made an effort, activating all those shields against the support parents provided. Elaborate grading methods, dividing students into groups, a different technique for every test, time limits tightened so no one could look things up on Google. And what happened? We were still better. We won! The white-and-red are the colors of the invincible!
If teachers had put as much effort into teaching their students as they put into devising ways to test what they had not taught during remote lessons, we would have had geniuses! It would have been paradise on earth. Instead, we had to help our children.
Why? Because grades are the most important thing! It is about victory! Not knowledge, not what remains in one’s head—that does not count in Polish schools. In this system, we fight only for the average. For fives, sixes, for fractions of a point after the decimal! And when we fight, we fight to the end. It is about honor, Poland, everything! Because Kowalski’s mother is sitting in on remote learning and helping hers take those tests too, while Nowak’s father studied at a university of technology and does his child’s assignments in the sciences.
What about the children, practical knowledge, and all those psychological ramblings about how the brain learns and how important it is for the knowledge passed on to a child to be useful and practical? None of that matters! Let it all go to waste—we are going for the grade!
Two days ago I met a little person returning home from school, exhausted. I asked him how he was, how life and school were going. He replied that it was awful, school was boring, bad and pointless, and that remote learning had been better. Less noise, shouting and stress. Then he suddenly asked whether I wanted to see his grades. Of course I did! The kid is great and smart; besides, I like the boy. I told him to show me the grades. He opened the e-school diary app on his phone and proudly presented his final grades. Straight fives from top to bottom. I was speechless. I told the kid congratulations, that I respected him, because it was a hell of a lot of work, because it meant blood, sweat and tears.
Still, some voice in my head told me that having those fives during the pandemic was madness, in a school where what matters is cramming, passing and forgetting—but I kept silent. I did not ask whether he remembered anything behind those fives. Whether, for example, he knew the date the Treaty of Versailles or the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was signed, or could say something about covalent bonding or electronegativity, name several tributaries of the Oder, or describe the typologies of Poland’s natural landscapes. Or whether he at least knew the name of the tree growing beneath Ania’s window in the novel “Anne of Green Gables.” As I looked at him, I thought: perhaps he knows all of it? Perhaps I am the one who is wrong?
I congratulated him once again, and he replied that his mother would kill him for getting a one. He said it on a sunny day, lightly and without a care. But it sent a chill through me. “Your mother wouldn’t kill you, what are you saying?” I retorted. “She would kill me!” the nice child replied, deeply convinced that his belief was true. We laughed—it was just a little joke.
Parent, you would not kill your child because they got a one, would you?! You might yell at them, take away their phone, punish them somehow so the lesson would stick, but you would not kill them? Right?
Grażyna Hanaf