Back to School

So it's the Tuesday after Labor Day, back to school day here where we live. Of course Mark went back to school over a week ago, and if I weren't on sabbatical I would have gone back last Monday; fall starts slowly around here. But I put Mariah on her bus at 7 and took Nick into his classroom at 9 this morning, so it really is back-to-school day. Both kids are in their last year at their respective schools. As I was walking Nick in this morning, a woman I know who lives in the neighborhood (whose son is Mariah's age) called out to me, "Aren't you ever leaving this school?" Her kids are in middle and high school, but here I am still walking into the elementary school. Indeed, I've been a parent at this school for 12 years now, ever since Mariah was in kindergarten. Nick started pre-K there the year she started middle school, so they never went to the same school but we haven't had a break, either.

Not that we wanted one. It's been a great elementary school for both kids. If not every teacher was fabulous, still the kids have done fine and over all we've been satisfied. The only teacher both kids had was their fourth grade teacher, and she was wonderful. So were both second grade teachers, one third, one first . . . and so on. In fifth grade, the kids have a "homeroom" but they move around a bit, in preparation for middle school. (They've been switching for math and, last year, science, since third grade anyway.)

Nick's class seemed smaller today when I dropped him off. I know there are fewer fifth grade classes than there were fourth grades--parents start fleeing the elementary schools a year early in the hopes of heading off middle-school woes. So several of Nick's friends won't be around this year, and we're sad about that. Still, he was eager to get started and seemed happy to see old friends when he got in this morning.

Mariah's last year of high school will, of course, involve the college search. We spent so much time thinking about college this summer that right now high school feels like a little bit of a let-down to her. I'm hoping that changes as her classes get started and she settles back into her various activities.

In the meantime I need to put these hours to good use. I have 11-1/2 months of my sabbatical left, and so far it's been slow going. Time to get into gear now.

Decaffeinated

Nick is sick. He's been achey and feverish since Monday night, waking up drenched in sweat and terrified at odd hours. He's in good spirits, but I know he's frustrated to be missing these last, "fun" days of school. His class is working on a poetry project: each kid writes some poems, edits them (with adult help), copies them neatly into a bound blank book, and illustrates them. I was the adult helper for an hour or so last week and these kids are really writing some great stuff, from the ode to snot by one somewhat mischievous kid, to the acrostic commemorating a lost friend, to the shape poem elongating the child's b-o-r-e-d-o-m with the SOLs (VA's standards of learning tests, for those who don't know). They worked with focus and enthusiasm even though they had a sub running the show and didn't really know me.

In fact, the last time I worked with these kids I was wrangling them backstage at their big dance event a few weeks ago, and I was not their favorite person then. One pair of boys was misbehaving over and over again, and I finally looked one in the eye and said,

"Do you know who I am?"
Nervous nod.
"I'm Nick's mom."
"I know."
"OK, so if you know that, I'm sure Nick has also told you that I'm not very nice. In fact, I'm kind of mean. So you want to do what I say, OK?"
Another, more energetic, still nervous nod. And, for what it's worth, good behavior for the next quarter hour or so.

Given that history, I was glad no one ran screaming away from me. In fact, they brought their poems to me gladly and accepted my corrections and comments gratefully. I felt bad when I had to make corrections--as if correct spelling were the most important thing about their work. (Truly, by the time they're in college, many of them will believe that, or a version of it.) I tried to praise the energy, the idea, the form, first, and then move on to how "tragedy"* is really spelled, or why "putteet" isn't the same as "petite." They nodded and went back to work, hunching over their desks intently.

So that's what Nick is missing this week, though I'm hoping he'll make it in tomorrow. The idea is that he'll take cupcakes in, in the time-honored tradition of celebrating summer birthdays before the end of the year.

Oh, and the title of this post? I'm doing all this--helping out in the classroom, staying home with a sick kid, planning to bake cupcakes--without caffeine. But more on that another time. This has gone on too long already.


*I believe this poem was about being buried by paperwork. It was one of my favorites.

[edited to add: Nick has liked this project so much--and, to be fair, is so bored at home--that he just asked me to go in and pick it up for him so he could work on it at home.]

Things I've Learned Lately

• When I began the 48-Hour Book Challenge I piled up the recent library books on the stairs and just pulled volumes off as they appealed. One that I had also picked up, not for the challenge, was Elizabeth Zimmerman's Knitting without Tears. It's one of those books that you hear about all the time. It's not one of the pretty new knitting books with lots of pictures; it's all just practical advice. And I learned that not only did I learn to knit wrong, I purled wrong as well. This sort of makes sense, as she explains it. Somehow my "German" needle-holding technique led to the wrong-way purl, which makes the wrong-way knit almost necessary. So now I know how to purl the right way, it makes knitting the right way easier. Sometimes the secondary technique is actually the one that matters.
• I'm not good at following the rules right now. So while I did indeed start the notebook described here, I have not yet used it in the way she describes.
  
• I think the not-following-rules thing is a function of age. It began just as I entered my forties. I remember one morning standing up to Nick's preschool teacher, who didn't like how long it took us to say good-bye in the mornings ("Y'all linger," she said disapprovingly). I ignored her, figuring I could take as long to say good-bye to my baby as I --and he-- wanted. That didn't bother him, but he did get upset with me when I didn't cross the street at the crosswalk and backtalked the security guard who gave me a hard time about it. I was ok with Nick wanting to follow the rules--that's appropriate for a four-year-old, after all. But I sure wasn't going to let a guy in a uniform tell me I didn't know how to cross an empty street, holding my son's hand.
  
• The thing is, I was like Nick long into my adulthood. Rules matter. I like rules: they tell you what's expected, they simplify decision-making, they provide order and continuity in what can be a disordered world.
  
• But maybe what I really like--and certainly what Nick liked at that age, and still does--is ritual. The calming certainty that things will be done the same way as before. Nick's good-bye ritual at age three was a fascinating thing to behold (and worth its own essay, another time); one of my favorite things about it was that it seemed such a child-sized reflection of my own need for order and consistency.
  
• I've become one of those people who says "when I was your age" or "when I was younger" even "at my age." This, too, is obviously a function of age (middle).
  
• When I was younger order mattered to me more. I need to think about this for a while, but I'm seeing the signs everywhere--not just in petty defiance of preschool functionaries, or the refusal to follow directions in a writing book. In unpaid bills and missed deadlines (not so good); in messy creative re-thinkings of previous projects (maybe ok).
• At a party the other evening I found myself saying "at my age" and being called on it. Turns out no one there believed I was over forty (or at least they were really really flattering me, for no particular reason). I think I might start telling people I'm fifty just to hear the flattery. (Yes, I'm aware of how this one might backfire. So probably not.)
  

Kindergarten readiness?

(Cross-posted from the other blog...)

Lots of posts out in the world today about yesterday's NYT article on kindergarten readiness. The take-home lesson I got from it was that if you can afford to think about "red-shirting" your child (keeping him--and it's most often him--home for a year when he's technically eligible for kindergarten), then whether you do or not, he'll probably be fine. That is, school "success" is primarily a socio-economic, not an age, issue. If you need the free day-care, and your kid isn't really ready for school, you'll send him/her anyway and s/he may not "succeed" as well as one might hope. If, on the other hand, you don't need the free day-care, you can probably provide what your kid needs.

Yes, this is reductive. But note that all the "red-shirt" success stories are from people who didn't need free day-care.

Anecdotes:

I was a young starter: with a February birthday I should have started kindergarten at five, but since I knew how to read, I started at four. (I was briefly "held back" when we moved, but then started first grade--in another school--at five.) At my recent college reunion I kept reminding people I was a year further away from fifty than they were. Nice. (Hmm, maybe those social skills still need work?)

I probably should have taken a gap year between high school and college. My parents wanted me to, but I was academically ambitious and up for the challenge. Emotionally/psychologically, maybe not so much, but I got by ok and I don't feel scarred by the experience. As a nerdy kid, I was used to being a bit on the outskirts of things socially anyway--I'm not sure age had a whole lot to do with it. I did take three years between college and graduate school, and that was an absolute necessity, in my case. I think grad school would have chewed me up and spat me out at 21, but at 24 I had supported myself for three years, moved across the country, and figured out that I was both employable and at least marginally date-worthy. I no longer thought my only successes would be academic, and that made grad school's pressures much easier to bear.

Mariah, with her December birthday, is one of the older kids in her grade. One of her best friends, three months older, just graduated from high school; Mariah's got another year. She's academically at the top of her class and seems to be holding her own socially/emotionally. She could have skipped at one point, but we opted for a multi-age grouping (in a Montessori middle school) instead. She doesn't seem to have any regrets, and is considering taking a gap year between HS and college even though this would have her turning 20 as a first-year college student. (I wish all my students would take a gap year...)

Nick, with his early August birthday, is one of the youngest kids in his grade. He's not markedly smaller than other boys--this is the year some are shooting up and some aren't, and he's still right in the middle--nor is he particularly delayed socially as far as I can tell. (He does sometimes cry more easily than other kids, but is that his age or just his temperament? Hard to say...though it's true that his mother was a big cry-baby in elementary school.) Academically, he's doing more than fine. According to "conventional wisdom"--which is that boys mature more slowly, so should redshirt if anyone should--he should have been held back and Mariah sent ahead, but we actually did benefit from the free day-care (public preschool at age four) and never really thought seriously about holding him back. Will he struggle in college? If he's like his sister, maybe we'll suggest a gap year at that point. Right now, though, he's fine.

One more anecdote: when my younger brother was tested for kindergarten, he was asked to draw a man, but drew something else--maybe a table?--instead. He was a bit young (November birthday) but pretty bright. The teacher or principal or someone called my mother and said he wasn't ready, he couldn't draw a man. My mother, though, talked to my brother who said he just didn't feel like drawing a man--and convinced the school administration to take him anyway. Years later he admitted that he really couldn't draw a man--but he did know how to game the system!

So there are my anecdotes. I find myself wishing more and more for flexibility in schooling, for some kind of readiness-testing that looked at the whole child rather than just the age or just a test or two. Obviously that's what home-schooling gives people, and that's absolutely what's most appealing about it. But for those who can't or won't take that option, for whatever reason--what to do?

Skipping Parent-Teacher Conference Day

Nick has no school for teacher conferences and he's coming to class with me. I'm not going to see his teacher. This is the second conference of the year, the second one we've missed. Poor Nick: this sounds like classic second-child treatment. But it's really not. We know his teacher (she taught Mariah seven years ago) and we see her in the mornings when we drop him off, as well as on the occasional afternoons when she accompanies the kids outside for pick-up. We e-mail with her. She knows us, and we know her. We have casual daily contact, and that gives us a lot of confidence about what's going on when we're not there.

But even if we didn't, I'm not sure we'd get a whole lot from the conferences. Neither does Emily Brazelon, and she has an interesting idea (not original with her, but still) about how to make them better. One thing that's missing from the article: the cost of missing work to attend a conference. Can everyone afford to take a personal or sick day to meet with their kids' teacher? (Of course, if that Texas legislation had passed, one could weigh that against the cost of missing a conference: a $500 fine! Now that's a solution...)

Middle School

I'm just catching up with last Sunday's NYTimes, as usual at the end of a week. By the time I read it nothing is really news any more, but it's still interesting to see what was on the Grey Lady's mind earlier in the week. Last Sunday it was, among other things, middle school (or, preteens).

Where I live parents start obsessing about middle school when their kids are in second grade, if not earlier. It's playground talk, cocktail party chatter, coffee hour conversation. We have elementary schools we like, both public and private, and then the black hole.

Not really, of course. In fact there are lots of options here, which may be part of the problem. There are two small private middle schools with innovative curriculums, one for girls and one for boys, both encompassing grades 5-8. There are private K-12 schools, both co-ed and single-sex, that take in new kids in either 5th or 6th. There is a preK-8 Montessori school, where Mariah did 7th and 8th grade quite happily. (This one's very small and 7th and 8th meet together, with the same teachers.) There are a couple of parochial schools that run K-8 and seem to take new kids in pretty much whenever. There is an IB middle school within a larger public school. And there are a couple of "model" public middle schools, one within walking distance of our house.

So what's the problem? I think, as the article suggests, the problem is that there is no one-size-fits-all model for this age group (roughly 11-14 or so). In fact I'm not sure that 10-14 is even, really, a coherent "age group." Actually, I'm quite sure it isn't. Have you ever seen an 11-year-old boy stand next to a 14-year-old girl? They might be from different species.

The single-sex schools do a good job of serving a small number of kids. They are warm and friendly and, as I said, innovative. But they ask you to pull your kid from his/her familiar elementary school a year early, and a lot of kids (Mariah was one) don't want to do that. (They also don't have nearly enough spaces for the kids who want them, which is both their greatest asset--they have very small classes--and, for many, their greatest drawback.)

The other privates have their advantages and disadvantages: it's hard to break into a cohesive community (and, for the most part, these are) in pre-adolescence; they are expensive; they can be socially very exclusive for the parents as well as the kids. But they seem to do a good job educating the children who go there.

The public schools look like fortresses. There is no grass around them. Kids stand around on the blacktop during recess looking like convicts in a prison yard. Mariah spent a year in one and ran screaming in the other direction, to the touchy-feely Montessori school where the whole group went for a walk/run every afternoon. But some of her high school friends stuck it out and got a reasonably good education (including honors credits that transferred to their high school, unlike Mariah's), and appear to be well-adjusted kids. The IB program was new when Mariah was coming through, and she didn't want to be a guinea pig--but Nick has friends with older siblings there, and for all the problems the whole school-within-a-school model has, that's probably what we'll aim for.

What saddens me a bit is that a nice group of kids will be splitting up over the next few years. Some are already planning to head off to the single-sex schools next year. Others will start home-schooling, or go private, or choose one of the several different public schools. I know there's a great advantage to breaking up cliques and moving into new environments, but I'm wondering if age 10-12 is the best time to do that.

I have no answers, just questions. And worries. But since I have this conversation about once a week in various face-to-face venues, I'm also feeling a bit blase about it. It will work out, somehow. And I don't think the New York Times is going to make a bit of difference.