The Other Side of the Door

Summer winds down and school looms on the horizon, sharpened pencils waiting to etch names onto crisp paper, colorful Flair pens doodling in the margins, backpacks overwhelming small frames.  The first day of school holds the promise of a fresh start, anticipation and excitement hanging in the air, hiding behind shy smiles and jokes between friends.

I’ve faced the first day of school as a student, moving from decorated cardboard supply boxes and kitten adorned Trapper Keepers to overpriced college textbooks and reams and reams of lined paper soon to be covered in notes and doodles and office hours.

As a teacher, I started a few weeks before the students, carefully choosing fabric for my bulletin boards, buying supplies in bulk, rearranging my classroom too many times in anticipation of group work and testing and access to different areas in the room.

This year, the first day of school looms, and I’m wavering between excitement and denial from moment to moment.

This year is the first year I am facing back to school as a mother.

Abbey is going to preschool.

She is beyond thrilled to be starting school next month.  A small smile spreads into a grin on her little face when she talks about it.  Lately, she wants to play teacher and student, a game that works out better when she doesn’t try to include Dylan as a student.

I am thrilled for her.  She loves stories and writing and playing games and dress-up and pretend.  I watch her attempting to write letters and carefully counting, and I can picture her in a classroom, sitting at an impossibly small chair, a pencil clutched in her hand.

My mental picture expands, seeing the other children in her class, and I feel my stomach tighten with worry.

Slow to warm up to new people and new situations, will her new classmates be kind?  What if they mistake her hesitation for disinterest?  Will her teacher understand that she grows quiet and retreats to the periphery out of shyness and not defiance?  When her voice drops to a whisper, will someone lean in to hear her, encouraging her lovely voice to speak more confidently?

Helping her make this transition is part of my job; I know I need to happily urge her forward into this new phase.

Yet as the summer days drift closer to fall, I find myself reaching for her hand more than necessary, catching her eye to bestow an extra smile, reminding her of how much I love her, hugging her eleventy-billion times each day. 

I yearn to envelop her with all of my love, to make that love tangible to tuck away in a pocket of her backpack, comforting her throughout the day.

I have been a student.  I have been a teacher.

This year, I am a mother, and for the first time, I will be on the other side of the classroom door when the bell signals the beginning of class.

But I will be waiting for her at the end of the day, my arms and heart ready to welcome her home.

going to dance with her little backpack

she's going to look so funny with a regular backpack!

today I'm pouring my heart out about Abbey starting school

come back tomorrow when I talk about a part of back to school that ALWAYS gets me excited...the shopping!

Education, Capitalism, and Tutus

What, those things don't go together?

When Abbey goes to dance, I wait in the lobby.  I can leave her in the room by herself, but I'm not ready to leave the premises quite yet.  Besides, it's an opportunity for Dylan and me to hang out on our own, and I don't really want to spend it in a car.

The first week, we spent most of the time hanging out with a mom and her youngest son.  I also met her oldest son and saw her daughter.  All three were wearing t-shirts emblazoned with the name of an exclusive private school in our area for gifted students.  And by exclusive I mean crazy expensive.  I realize in some parts of the country, expensive grade schools are a dime a dozen, but where we live, even most of the private schools don't cost the equivalent of a year at Harvard.

Education is something I think about all the time, and those three shirts really made me consider the role money plays in education and the inexorable ties between the two.  The school in question, as I mentioned before, really plays up the fact that it is geared toward "gifted" children.  Don't get me wrong; the mother was lovely, and her youngest son was polite and articulate.  (Plus they couldn't compliment Dylan enough, which never hurts!)

But really?  Three truly "gifted" children in one family?  Yet, their parents are paying for them to be educated as gifted children, and they will never know an educational experience that isn't tailored to help them succeed in every way.  As a former teacher, I can only imagine the education that the teachers are able to provide at a school like that.  Tiny classes, involved parents, and curricular freedom to explore and work with student strengths, weaknesses, and (most importantly) interests.  That's just the beginning, because an education at a school like that can open academic doors all the way up the ladder of success.

Less than fifteen miles away, children are wasting away in classrooms without books, in buildings permeated with violence, in a district so plagued with problems that there are talks about the state taking over control of an entire public school district.  Teachers enter those classrooms with high hopes and dreams of educating those children but find themselves roadblocked by problems too extensive to get into in one blog post.  I know, because I worked in a school similar to those schools.

 

There are gifted kids in those schools, too.  I actually believe that the majority of children have the potential to thrive in the right environment, with the right tools and the right teachers to find their own particular gifts.  Knowing something happens in theory is one thing, but seeing it in practice is another, and it's tough to know that a thirty thousand dollar check, give or take a little, can buy a gifted label.  And though there are pitfalls to every situation, even the privileged ones, it's pretty obvious that a child with a thirty-thousand-dollar education enters the world on a different plane than the child who had to enter his or her classroom through metal detectors.

To lighten the mood, some pictures of my to-be-educated-by-public-schools-unless-I-win-the-lottery kids...

(If I did somehow win the lottery, miraculously since I don't buy tickets, I would buy them the best education I could find for them.  Which may or may not include a gifted label, because I don't know if that is a blessing or a curse, but that's another post, I think.)

ready for week two

the braid went back into a ponytail, but it keeps her hair out of her eyes

hanging out with Mommy

charming the ladies

flirting with the dancers

drooling on his shirt

all in an hour

on the move

because he likes to grab for the camera