The newspaper headline read, "Uproar Over Student Dress Code." I read on, ready to learn that students were up in arms over rules that outlawed nose studs or "Kill the Teachers" t-shirts. Nope. This time, it was the parents who were up in arms. Seems the dress code has been relaxed this year in that particular school so that kids can wear hats, hoodies and sunglasses in class. Quel horreur!
Am I missing something? How do hats, hooded sweatshirts, and sunglasses interfere with learning? Unless kids are pulling their hats and hoods down over their eyes so that they can't read their books, I don't see how it makes much difference what they wear. Of course, considering what my kids and I wear for "class" it's no wonder that I don't get this dress code business.
On Friday morning, Daughter announced that she wasn't going to change out of her pajamas because we take Friday off. If someone wants to crack a workbook or do something serious, they can, but it's not mandatory. Usually, Son and Daughter spend most of Friday in front of a screen of some sort and I goof off too. I've been known to finish two or three books by Friday afternoon. Sweats are probably our favorite outfits. However, we've been known to appear in ballet costumes (Daughter), cut-offs in January because we haven't done our weekly wash (Son), Dad's old flannel shirt because we have a cold and it's comforting (me) or wrapped in a blanket with our jammies on because we're having a rough day and it just feels better (all of us).
The article I read went on to say that students who wore sunglasses might not be maintaining eye contact, which is disrespectful and that's why teachers want the dress code to outlaw sunglasses in well-lighted classrooms. Gee, have I been missing the boat all this time, thinking that eye contact with whatever they were learning was more important than looking at me? Son often wears a hat and Daughter wears a hoodie when it's cold. In spite of this, they seem to be learning just fine. Are they atypical? Would they learn more without the hat and hoodie?
I guess this whole dress code thing reinforces one of the biggest beefs I have with schools: the emphasis on conformity. Kids are taught that there's a right way to look, act, think and feel and - strangely enough - it's the school's way. Maybe that's why schooled kids so often rebel and want to wear outlandish clothes or very few clothes? It reminds me of the kind of thing repressed populations have always done when outright rebellion isn't an option.
I went to high school when mini-skirts were in fashion. I still remember the teacher measuring up from the floor to our hems to make sure our skirts didn't exceed the sleaze limit and distract all those adolescent boys from The Scarlet Letter. Then we had to kneel on the floor and if our skirt didn't touch the floor, we had to wear a towel around it or call home for another skirt. In my case, they could have avoided all this by letting us wear jeans, which I would have preferred to skirts and dresses.
We do have a dress code in our family, but it's not something you can measure with a yardstick or write a list of rules for. If Dad raises his eyebrows at your outfit, you run it by Mom, who does one of two things. She says, "Your dad doesn't understand fashion. I'll talk to him", or she says, "No kid of mine is gonna walk around looking like a hooker/bum" and you take it off and put something else on.
I can think of only two occasions since the kids have been picking out their own clothes that I've had to say the latter and that was because of a swimsuit that would have fit Barbie and a shirt that had something on it that would get my kid beat up in most of the places he goes. In both cases, we talked about why they weren't good fashion choices. In both instances, after some time had passed, both kids thanked me for helping them avoid embarrassment and, maybe, a black eye.
My kids both have their own unique sense of style. Maybe it's because they're not with 20 other kids their own age every day. Maybe it's because we very rarely shop at the chain stores. Goodwill and resale stores are our haunts. The kids have gotten really good at spotting excellent buys like designer or handmade clothes that have been gently worn and well cared for. Now that we're drifting into the SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), it's even more important that we get a big bang for our fashion bucks. I mean, it's not cheap to dress like a 13th century noble or even a peasant. (Have you seen the price of wimples nowadays? Unreal! And don't even get me started on aumonieres.)
So here I sit at 10 in the morning, with my favorite old stained t-shirt, mismatched wool socks and stretched out sweatpants on. I feel sorry for all the kids who are sitting in a classroom somewhere in clothes they don't want to wear, learning subjects that someone else thinks are important to them, at an hour when most of them would be much happier in bed. I contrast this with my kids, both of whom are wearing some of their favorite clothes. They're studying history this morning with a showing of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court.
Earlier, Daughter did two pages of multiplication her way. The directions said: Make arrays of boxes to illustrate these multiplication problems. She got some graph paper and made the arrays but she didn't make boxes. Instead, she used hearts, flowers, Pikachu faces and elephant heads. She really enjoyed doing it and got the math right, too. Son researched armor online to figure out what kind of helmet he wants to get for youth fighting, which meant that he had to think about which period his SCA persona is going to come from, which meant that he had to learn something about the whole spectrum of the Middle Ages.
Tomorrow, we're all going to archery practice, even the geek who is still having trouble dealing with the lack of computers in the Middle Ages. He's toying with the idea of having his persona be an inventor. (Did they even have geeks in the Middle Ages? Was Da Vinci a geek? I wouldn't be surprised.) Much history will be learned, I'm sure, along with social skills, geometry, and math. (None of that "I shot an arrow into the air" stuff with the SCA. If you shoot an arrow, you'd better know where it's headed or the marshal will cut your mead ration.)
My kids are willing to bow to dress rules because they want to participate in the SCA because they understand that it's necessary to create the world of the Middle Ages (the best parts of it anyway, as the SCA says). They get to try on different personas with the various outfits they wear. I wonder what would happen if schooled kids went to school in costumes from various historical periods? Who knows, maybe it would boost history test scores. Or maybe they'd just get laughed at. Or, if they were studying the 1960's, they might get their skirts measured.