Fast Forward: 2008

Once upon a time, there was a little girl who loved school.

Before she could even walk she loved school, loved it so much that she refused to nap while she was there (unless one of her teachers - and she loved them all - held her), loved it so much that, sometimes, she would cry when the morning ended because she didn't want to leave. The school had a cook, and the cook baked fresh bread and cinnamon rolls so the halls smelled delicious and she would always cut up extra fruit for the girl or make a special no-cheese pizza just for her. After the little girl learned to walk, she loved school even more because she could run in and out through the almost always open door to find grass and sand and water and every kind of weather. Grand messes were expected, even welcomed. She was learning, even if she didn't know it.

Then her family moved, and the little girl had to find another school. The first one wasn't so great, but when she was three she found a new school to love. Again, the door was almost always open. Again, the food was fresh and tasty. She even learned to prepare her own snack when she was hungry, not when someone said it was time to eat. She loved her teachers. She loved her friends. But, most of all, she loved to work. Planets, continents, every bone in the body, biomes, reading, math...nothing was off limits. Cicadas leave cool exoskeletons behind. Orange peel takes a long time to turn into compost. Carrots you grow yourself taste especially good. Some things are symmetrical and some are asymmetrical. No one ever told her she wasn't old enough to learn something. Every child was capable, and every child was gifted.

One hot summer May day, she said goodbye to her beloved school and her teachers and some of her friends. She had grown up too much for this school. It was time for kindergarten.

And on another hot August day later that year, the little girl who loved school began to disappear.


Last week, I shared some memories of my first day of school. Now it's time to fast forward from LBJ's Great Society to Bush's No Child Left Behind. If you had told me three years ago that I would abandon the public school system, the system that gave me a strong education, the system I consider to be a cornerstone of our country, the system I have advocated until folks wanted to stuff a sock in my mouth I would have laughed you all the way to the Mexican border (and that, my friends, is pretty far from this part of Texas). But it's happened. I'm Blue, and I'm a private school mom.

You've been spared a very long post, detailing - year by year - Small Child's journey through public school (unfortunately, I wasn't spared writing it; deleting it was a pleasure.). Let's just say this: with every day, every month, every year, every grade we saw less joy. A girl who often was asked to stop working because the school day was over transformed into a girl with page after page after page of unfinished work in her chair pocket. She climbed sullenly into the car at the end of each day with nothing to say about anything.  I expected to see that kind of behavior near puberty, not in first and second grades. 

We approached the problems from all the expected angles. Positive reinforcement changed nothing (nor, I'm sorry to admit, did scolding). Her pediatrician pronounced her in perfect health. Spurred by her veteran teacher's suggestion that she might have ADD, the kind that presents as "sometimes just not there, kind of day-dreamy," we subjected her to a full neuropsychological evaluation midway through second grade. 

The verdict?  "That's one extremely smart girl you've got there. She's a little anxious and a lot bored. Three hours of GT pull-out a week is simply not enough for this one. If I were you, I'd put her in Outstanding Private School 90 Minutes Away or move back to Oregon ASAP because she misses it very much [In the interest of full disclosure, the psychologist had spent a good bit of time in our former town.]. Plus, she's seriously grieving for her best friend, who moved far away. She needs to learn to complete the stuff she doesn't like, but you can't eradicate her personality type, which simply doesn't have much patience for nonsense. The focus on testing in this school district is going to be a big problem for her."

So we worked on the "self-discipline" stuff and saw improvement. She was selected a year early for chorus, and along with four of her friends had a piece of her art appear in a national publication. She earned more Accelerated Reader points than anyone else in her grade (granted, many of the points resulted from family reading time, an advantage many children don't enjoy, but still). 

That sums up the good news.  The bad news? Two new elementary schools were scheduled to open the next fall, and the district was taking a hard line on intra-district transfers. Small Child would not, under any circumstances, be allowed to remain with her cohort, many of whom she'd learned with for over five years. She would lose her art, chorus and GT teachers, a much more significant issue that that of new classmates.  And the "Mean Girl" phenomenon reared its ugly head, which made the loss of Best Friend even worse. None of us were expecting Mean Girls for at least another year. Naive much?

Locally, we had two private school options. One, the good Catholic school her cousins attend, offers no GT enrichment and only one class per grade. The other, a K-12 "Christian" school, promotes the kind of elitist evangelical dreck we abhor. While some affluent individuals of hell-bound heathen non-Christian faiths may choose to simultaneously shelter their children from reality and laugh over the day's silly dogma around the dinner table, that just won't work for us. Luckily, the universe helped us find a true Montessori school within a reasonable distance. While we would have preferred a truly secular option, we are comfortable with the gentle, Episcopalian theology on offer. But what to do?

Agony ensued. Hand-wringing. Were we selling out? Turning our backs on the community in which we lived? Sheltering our child rather than insisting she face the world's realities, even those that may not fit her "personality style?" Insuring that Small Child would lose her hometown friends? Taking our marbles and sulking home because things weren't exactly the way we wanted them to be? 

I'd recently read several beautiful essays about families' decisions to choose public school, and I understood and agreed with them wholeheartedly. But my child. My child. The public school system I remembered, the one my teacher friends labor tirelessly to create, the one I still believe is possible, is not the reality in our town, no matter how much I want it to be. All the philosophy and political theory in the world wouldn't mean squat if the still-slightly-flickering light of curiosity I could see in my girl's eyes truly disappeared. 

For once, I left analysis behind and just was. And then I knew that she needed a change. We all did. And we chose a place of peace.

The result?

After the first full day of third grade, when her mother arrived to pick her up, the little girl who loved school miraculously reappeared . She opened her mouth when she got in the car and didn't stop reporting for 40 miles. She sang all the way to school on the second day then smiled, "The other girls are unusually like me."

One week in, she was equally enthusiastic. She hopped into the car and said, "Today, Millie*? [note girl inflection] You know, my friend? She did, like, the biggest thing on the bead frame, it's like millions in multiplication and division, [note on-going run-on sentence problem] she was so proud of herself, and I started multiplication today, but I like division better, I've decided to call it, 'multiplication minus' since it's the opposite, everyone always talks about how multiplication is so challenging and I thought it would be but it's not because, like, you know, it's just like addition and addition and addition and addition?"

Pause

"And we had P.E. and played monkey ball and mosquito tag? You know, boys are, like, so weird? You know, annoying? They , like, pretend hit each other and stuff, like punch the air where no one is? Weird."

Thus ends our best back-to-school ever. 

And, I gotta say, she just may be right about boys.

*The name of the friend in question has been changed in my endless quest for privacy.

Canon Ball

Final exams begin next week.  The bad news is I'll be grading, but the good news is I will no longer be prepping for classes.  More time to write and to pack my bags for the annual trip to Oregon. Tick, tick, tick....

I've been frustrated this spring by my students' lack of a common knowledge base.  I could blabber on for days with hypotheses as to this sad state of affairs (blahblahblah BushNCLB blahblahblah Creationism blahblahblah AbstinenceOnly). I noticed some erosion when I returned to the classroom in 2003.  But this year, after 18 months away, I faced a mudslide.

I risk sounding like some kind of Bill Bennett conservative (those of you who know me will have to assure those of you who don't that nothing - nothing - could be less true), but can I please whine about the good old days when I could stand in front of a college classroom and expect my students - regardless of their majors - to have at least a "cocktail party" understanding of Darwin, Marx, and Freud?

In our liberal arts environment, I teach freshmen, sophomores, juniors, and seniors in the same class. Some will go on as English majors, while others are fulfilling a breadth requirement. I select damn hard but devilishly interesting novels and season them with a variety of critical perspectives.  I know it's an introductory level class, but why should the big kids be the only ones who have any fun? Usually, most students - even the first years - rise admirably to the challenges. This year I removed important supplemental readings from my course (Marx, Freud, Benjamin, Malraux) because my students were having enough trouble with the literature - never mind the theory.   I doled the good stuff out as treats ("Would you like some theory, little boy?") on the sly to the ones who were ready.* Kind of broke my heart.

Sorry to beat the tired old drum of the canon. But I'd be interested in your thoughts.  Our institution recently did away with a decades-old series that began as a course in the foundations of Western thought but then morphed to include history of science (real science, lest you worry) as well as exposure to other, non-dominant cultures.  During my undergraduate years it was known, unfortunately, as "Heritage of Western Man."  Yes, we all grumbled as we took our unsupported ( but then-perky) breasts and bounced off in a feminist huff, but I can tell you that I thanked the curriculum gods during my first graduate seminar and every one thereafter.

Please comment, really.  What should we do about this?  I'm struggling both as an educator and as a parent. I want Small Child to be versed in Post-Colonial literature and history, but doesn't she also need to know why it's Post-Colonial?

Help.

* Here's a special thank you to some students who made it worth my time: the one who decided to audit the course early on then rarely missed another class, the one who asked for Marx's and Freud's writings on fetishism, the one who explained Hegelian dialectic so I wouldn't have to, the one who wrote the best essay on Faulkner when she thought it stank, the one who is facing the real world in ways the others can't fathom, and the one who throws so much heart into every single page.  If you ever find this blog, you know who you are.