School Daze
The Padre and I made the decision to put Mr. A in the local public school for kindergarten. It looked like a nice little elementary school--plenty of play space, a garden, a good score on the standardized tests.
It was a nightmare.
The way some people carry on about public schools, you might think that I'm going to follow up that last sentence with a litany of horrors about BDSM demonstrations on the play ground and the bowl full of strawberry flavored condoms on the principal's desk.
Actually, no. Perfectly ordinary parents took their children there every day. Our problem wasn't with some kind of moral outrage, but rather with the education itself. Let's start with what was missing from Mr. A's kindergarten class room: blocks, any toys at all, finger paints, those little math manipulatives for patterning. What was there, you ask? A few computers, which frankly, rank second only to television in terms of "kiddie speed" for Mr. A; worksheets; desks; more worksheets; sticker star charts; the 'face' chart--green for good; yellow for warning; red for trouble (guess which face Mr. A was on all the time); did I say worksheets?
It broke my heart. What was worse was the effect on my kid. He's what is politely called a 'spirited child' or, more bluntly, a pistol. He's full of motion and energy and will. He's creative and combative. None of this was okay in kindergarten. He was expected to sit still and do all those insane worksheets. The principal believed in 'bell to bell' instruction, after all! He was constantly in trouble for talking--getting his name put on the 'red face', which made me wonder what happened if you slugged somebody. Was there some super-secret purple face?
When he got home, he was totally exhausted by all these constraints. On good days, he would strip down to his underpants and make mud in the backyard. Most days, though, he would alternate from whiny, clingy and weepy to raging and violent. A request that he put his shoes by the door would be met with shouting that we were 'so mean' and possibly chucking the shoes for good measure. Or he might dissolve into inconsolable tears because he was on the red face again or because he didn't get the most stars in a day. In fact, the days when he stayed on the green face seemed the worst, as though the effort he expended on conforming to the school's outrageous demands for silence and stillness had left him without resources to be even vaguely pleasant at home. No matter what face he was on, though, he seemed to have internalized the shame message of that face thingy: We, the authority figures, will label you, and everyone will know, and that is who you REALLY are.
And then there was the homework. Yes, homework in kindergarten. Mostly more of those damned worksheets. Mr. A found those extremely insulting to his intelligence and often complained that he had already done it at school. The thing is, I totally agreed with his annoyance at them, and it's really hard to enforce rules you think are stupid. I couldn't convince him to just do it and be done. He would whine and fight and scream, and often, eventually end by ripping at his paper or trying to hit me. He wouldn't be talked down from his anger. He would accept no sympathy or direction. He would fly into a rage and, more often than not, the Padre and I would have to carry him upstairs by his flailing arms and legs.
All this left us with almost no parental capital to spend on the things that mattered: not brutalizing your mother or father, for instance, or not screeching at the top of your lungs at the door of the room where your baby brother is (finally, blessedly) asleep.
Where do you go from here? How do you talk to a teacher about your kid when a) she seems to have already decided he's a problem and b) what he really needs is something totally and completely different from what's on offer? In the end, we just took him out. The teacher and the principal both expressed surprise and wanted us to reconsider, maybe check out another kindergarten classroom. I already had, though. The other classrooms had just as many worksheets and that ridiculous face chart. The testing that was putting so much pressure on our five-year-old would continue no matter what classroom he was in. We couldn't see that there was any meaningful difference in instruction between the classrooms.
We're homeschooling him for the rest of the year and checking out alternatives for next year.
I'm so sad about all this, though. The Padre and I had such high hopes for our neighborhood school: letting Mr. A walk to school, making friends in the neighborhood, walking to their houses. The kind of stuff I missed out on by going to parochial school and that the Padre had, since he grew up in a small town. We've always wanted Mr. A to be part of the broader community. We may be religious freaks, but we don't want to keep our kids overly sheltered from the realities of the world we live in. (What was that in the Gospel about being salt and light?)
What made this so hard, though, was that Mr. A was making friends with kids in the neighborhood. School wasn't totally awful. There was theatre once a week, which he adored. But these actual positives and what the Padre and I had imagined weren't enough to make it worth keeping him at that school, when faced with the oversensitive, ferociously angry, agressive kid we were dealing with every day. More broadly, what makes us sad is that is seems that there isn't really room in the wider community for oddballs, which I freely admit our family is. Ultimately, the school seemed to be driving toward a dead, flat sameness. No creativity, no diversity of thought or approach.
I don't know how to escape this steamrolling monolith except by getting out of the way, which feels like a kind of failure.
It was a nightmare.
The way some people carry on about public schools, you might think that I'm going to follow up that last sentence with a litany of horrors about BDSM demonstrations on the play ground and the bowl full of strawberry flavored condoms on the principal's desk.
Actually, no. Perfectly ordinary parents took their children there every day. Our problem wasn't with some kind of moral outrage, but rather with the education itself. Let's start with what was missing from Mr. A's kindergarten class room: blocks, any toys at all, finger paints, those little math manipulatives for patterning. What was there, you ask? A few computers, which frankly, rank second only to television in terms of "kiddie speed" for Mr. A; worksheets; desks; more worksheets; sticker star charts; the 'face' chart--green for good; yellow for warning; red for trouble (guess which face Mr. A was on all the time); did I say worksheets?
It broke my heart. What was worse was the effect on my kid. He's what is politely called a 'spirited child' or, more bluntly, a pistol. He's full of motion and energy and will. He's creative and combative. None of this was okay in kindergarten. He was expected to sit still and do all those insane worksheets. The principal believed in 'bell to bell' instruction, after all! He was constantly in trouble for talking--getting his name put on the 'red face', which made me wonder what happened if you slugged somebody. Was there some super-secret purple face?
When he got home, he was totally exhausted by all these constraints. On good days, he would strip down to his underpants and make mud in the backyard. Most days, though, he would alternate from whiny, clingy and weepy to raging and violent. A request that he put his shoes by the door would be met with shouting that we were 'so mean' and possibly chucking the shoes for good measure. Or he might dissolve into inconsolable tears because he was on the red face again or because he didn't get the most stars in a day. In fact, the days when he stayed on the green face seemed the worst, as though the effort he expended on conforming to the school's outrageous demands for silence and stillness had left him without resources to be even vaguely pleasant at home. No matter what face he was on, though, he seemed to have internalized the shame message of that face thingy: We, the authority figures, will label you, and everyone will know, and that is who you REALLY are.
And then there was the homework. Yes, homework in kindergarten. Mostly more of those damned worksheets. Mr. A found those extremely insulting to his intelligence and often complained that he had already done it at school. The thing is, I totally agreed with his annoyance at them, and it's really hard to enforce rules you think are stupid. I couldn't convince him to just do it and be done. He would whine and fight and scream, and often, eventually end by ripping at his paper or trying to hit me. He wouldn't be talked down from his anger. He would accept no sympathy or direction. He would fly into a rage and, more often than not, the Padre and I would have to carry him upstairs by his flailing arms and legs.
All this left us with almost no parental capital to spend on the things that mattered: not brutalizing your mother or father, for instance, or not screeching at the top of your lungs at the door of the room where your baby brother is (finally, blessedly) asleep.
Where do you go from here? How do you talk to a teacher about your kid when a) she seems to have already decided he's a problem and b) what he really needs is something totally and completely different from what's on offer? In the end, we just took him out. The teacher and the principal both expressed surprise and wanted us to reconsider, maybe check out another kindergarten classroom. I already had, though. The other classrooms had just as many worksheets and that ridiculous face chart. The testing that was putting so much pressure on our five-year-old would continue no matter what classroom he was in. We couldn't see that there was any meaningful difference in instruction between the classrooms.
We're homeschooling him for the rest of the year and checking out alternatives for next year.
I'm so sad about all this, though. The Padre and I had such high hopes for our neighborhood school: letting Mr. A walk to school, making friends in the neighborhood, walking to their houses. The kind of stuff I missed out on by going to parochial school and that the Padre had, since he grew up in a small town. We've always wanted Mr. A to be part of the broader community. We may be religious freaks, but we don't want to keep our kids overly sheltered from the realities of the world we live in. (What was that in the Gospel about being salt and light?)
What made this so hard, though, was that Mr. A was making friends with kids in the neighborhood. School wasn't totally awful. There was theatre once a week, which he adored. But these actual positives and what the Padre and I had imagined weren't enough to make it worth keeping him at that school, when faced with the oversensitive, ferociously angry, agressive kid we were dealing with every day. More broadly, what makes us sad is that is seems that there isn't really room in the wider community for oddballs, which I freely admit our family is. Ultimately, the school seemed to be driving toward a dead, flat sameness. No creativity, no diversity of thought or approach.
I don't know how to escape this steamrolling monolith except by getting out of the way, which feels like a kind of failure.
Comments
(Additionally, all I can think of that would make a small (3-9 year old) child sit still for long periods of time is stuff like Valium. Scary.)
And all that ADD/ADHD stuff? It seems like it's totally a plot to cram little boys into a box that fits more easily into the fast-paced, grown up world. Sad, sad, sad.