Pirate Supplies and Essays....

I grew up with education all around me as a kid, because BOTH my dad and my step-mum who I lived with all throughout elementary school were teachers, which meant that I always heard about your run of the mill teacher gripes: report cards, snotty nose kids, heckling parents and yes, the many, MANY flaws that are in the education system.

One of these flaws, of course, is that classes are way too big, and not enough kids are getting one on one help. Now I'm going to play devils advocate and say that although this isn't exactly the greatest situation, you have to understand the stress that the teachers themselves are under, too. If they had it their way, I'm sure that most teachers would make sure that classes were very small and that every student got individual attention. But sadly this world isn't designed entirely by a board of public school teachers, and the classes keep growing, the parents get more irate, and the kids keep falling by the wayside.

BUT there is hope!

Thanks for the wonderful people at McSweeney's (who I already knew were glorious, wonderful people to begin with thanks to McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes) there is the Pirate Supply store / Homework Help Center also known as 826 Valencia in San Francisco.

Pirate Supply Shop on the outside, tutoring center on the inside, and a McSweeney's publishing office somewhere in between,  826 Valencia is a unique and fantastic idea that offers help to kids for free in an attempt to make sure that each child in some way, shape, or form gets individual attention and gets help with problems that are exclusive to them.

Personally, I think that this is a great idea. Kids feel intrigued by the store, and then wind up getting help with their homework in a way that doesn't make them feel dumb, different, or anything like that. It wasn't 'The Center for Kids Who Need More Help' as David Egger so eloquently put it. It was simply 826 Valencia. 

BUT would this clever idea work in a place like Ingersoll? In a word, no.

I could go on all day about why this wouldn't work, but I can pretty much sum it down to a few main arguments. First of all, Ingersoll is much too small of a town. Most of the kids that go to school here are either from rural, farming families, or your average, middle class working families. That means that kids my age (aka the 'high school' crowd) are either working on their parents farm right after school, or they're working at a part time job. Many people wouldn't have time to go to a help center even if they wanted to. Which leads me to my next point:

Sure, everyone wants to get better grades. But going into a help center to do your homework creates a stigma whether you like it or not. Sure its not fair, but its true. If people found out that someone went to a 'help center' that person would automatically be labelled as dumb or remedial, and would be shunned a little, if not looked at differently (at the very least). Because Ingersoll is so small, everyone knows practically everything about everyone. If even one person knew of a kid that went to our very own 826 Valencia, word would get around and soon enough, out of peer pressure, that kid would stop going. It would take a kid who was cool enough to be different, and could get away with it, and who doesn't care what other people think to start a wave of people to go. And those kids are few and far between.

Also, who would run this make believe 826 Valencia? The one in San Francisco is mainly volunteer run, and I don't know if Ingersoll is exactly over flowing with volunteers who would be willing to haul themselves down town to help out a bunch of kids with their homework. I'm not saying that those people aren't out there, but I am saying that there's not enough of them to make it work. 

Lastly,  look at what happened to the Fusion Youth Center. It started off as a good idea: a place where kids in the area could hang out with their friends away from peer pressure, drugs, etc. It had a lot of funding backing it up, and showed a lot of promise. Sadly though, it turned into a spot known for its druggies and back crowd. Perhaps this is what would happen to our hypothetical Valencia too?

All in all, its a great idea, and I really, really do wish that every town could have its own 826 Valencia. I can't say for sure whether or not I myself would go if we had one here in town. I can certainly say that if a McSweeny's publishing company was in the back, I would be there all day, everyday trying to scrounge a job for myself, but other than that I don't know. Sure, we'd all like to think that we would all be flooding in to our own Valencia the second it opened, but really, we're all affected by the stigma that goes along with the phrase 'homework help' so no one can be sure. Hopefully though, there would be enough of us to make it work, or at the very least, keep the pirate/superhero/time travelling store in business, even if it was only for a few months.