The Good Enough Education
T his first week of kindergarten has been exhausting, the long day leaves Søren just ragged, I drive him home and he gets irrational and sob-y over things that wouldn’t normally throw his little extroverted self for a loop, like not being able to sit next to his only friend in the class — in the world! — at the lunch table. I suspect that it’s exhaustion, that the long days and the overwhelming new schedule, this huge place and the inability to guess what’s going to happen next, thehundreds of faces he’s never seen before, the teacher he doesn’t yet have a relationship or trust with — they’re all just getting to him. That it will get easier, soon. I mean I know that, but of course I second-guess myself because I am still me — did we push too hard? Is he too young? Why didn’t we wait another year? What if this is it and he hates school forever? But, no, he’s ok, the situation is ok, I’m ok…
His best friend in Portland was in his class the first three days, a child whom we met through the Suzuki teacher-who-must-not-be-named, but her mother has pulled her out of the kindergarten class, because the kindergarten teacher didn’t speak Spanish very well. The mother, one of my good friends, whom I admire and trust, is a native Spanish speaker, and her daughter is already brilliantly, fluently bilingual. And I understand her frustration, but don’t share it. It’s just sort of one of those weird fate things to be going through this with this friend, because she was frustrated with the violin teacher months before I was, and stuck it out because she trusted me…
This is how the school is set up: there is a class of native English speakers who are learning Spanish as a second language, and a class of native Spanish speakers learning English as a second language. And when the kids achieve a certain degree of literacy, reading and writing in their native language, they get switched over to the other language, so when he can read and write in English, my son will begin learning to read and write in Spanish, switching to the other teacher, the one who teaches in Spanish all day every day. So, right now he’s getting some Spanish vocabulary from somebody who doesn’t speak Spanish perfectly. I have to admit, she still speaks better than I do.
I am doing that thing where I feel guilty for not being as upset by a situation as, in my head, a ‘good mother’ would be… I am grateful he’s getting even inadequate Spanish. My sixth grader has so far gotten NO second language instruction (I suppose you could count the sign language in his kindergarten…) Still Søren, my kindergartner, is devastated to have his friend leave the class. Sigh.
I know the school isn’t a perfect situation. None of my kids is getting a perfect education. But you know? It’s good enough. They’re being taught by people who are not perfect teachers but who care, who show up and do their best, who are sacrificing and not making much money for the hours that teaching just requires, and it’s a hard job. And I don’t know if I am accepting it because I’m such a glass-half-full person, or because I have a lot faith in my kids and how I’ve raised them and in the universe to provide the things we need the most or if I am just lazy/exhausted/stretched thin with four kids . Does it sound like a rationalization if I say I am trying to put my energy into things like making music with them, sharing a love of books with them, having fun bicycling and hiking with them, working at marriage and at being the kind of family I want them to grow up in?
Here’s my little philosophy education curse kicking in, too: I have to ask myself what my reason is for sending my kids to school. My father sent me a copy of John Taylor Gatto’s Dumbing Us Down last spring right before he retired from teaching high school, and a lot of Gatto’s arguments about the destructive power of schools to crush kids’ spirits and curiosity and teach them all of the wrong things, do make sense, but it still doesn’t fit exactly with how I am feeling: I liked school, my kids like it, and it’s good for them to be exposed to world views and communication styles and ways of being besides our own. They are smart enough to sort out what they want to keep for themselves. I send them to school so they can experiment with self-hood in an environment besides our family, and we get to see the sixth-grader developing this intense moral reasoning and code of loyalty and justice, a willingness to speak up for the things he believes in, our third-grader happily fitting in with a bunch of smart and personable good friends, writing really creative and imaginative things, and for how sort of dreamy and distracted he can be at home, it’s surprising to see that in the context of school he comes across as pretty disciplined and diligent; who knows what I’ll see the other two do?
I don’t pretend that education and schooling are the same thing. So it makes sense that the point of education is not the same as the point of schooling. I know I haven’t yet come out and stated “I believe the point of education is X, the point of schooling is Y” I just have a sense of them being different. I am pretty sure that the point of education is not getting into the right college, getting the right career, making more money than you need. In fact I think the question of the “point” of education is about as meaningful as the “point” of food — we’re naturally inclined towards it, it serves to enable us to do scores of other things, and it’s enjoyable in and of itself. Maybe I just feel fortunate that the schooling hasn’t gotten in the way of the kids’ educations so far? And the air I am breathing as a mother is trusting myself, that if and when a problem comes up, we will move to find the best solution we can for our child. And that right now I am not taking melting down every day after school as an indication of a real problem.
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Well, and I pretty much melted down (which was not difficult in 110+ degree weather) at the end of every day of the first THREE WEEKS of state-university teacher training….and had to tell myself like a broken record, this will be okay, there’s a reason you are going through this, it’ll be better when you’re actually teaching, this won’t last forever….not that I’m saying Søren should have to tell himself all that shit. If I’m saying anything, I guess it’s just that first weeks are hard even on grown-ups, so of course he’s gonna melt down during his first week of kindergarten. I’m invariably in tears the first day on a new job. ALWAYS.
Funny too cos I been thinking about this in context of “my” students. They’ve written their first essay, one of observation and drawing conclusions about what they observe. They all more or less got the observation part right but they forgot to have a point to it–the “why am I reading this paper? what is it telling me?” piece. As I lugged my exhausted self and my books and papers around campus yesterday afternoon, I imagined asking them: “Why do you think the university/the English dept. wants you to be able to observe and describe stuff?” I’d get answers like “So we can do well in our jobs/so we can write better cover letters/so we can take other courses and pass them.” Then, I imagined asking, “Why do you think *I* want you to learn how to observe and describe?” Brief baffled silence, probably, followed by some wiseass saying, “Because the school makes you do it”–I shake my head, I say, “No–because it will give you pleasure. Because it makes your life richer and more interesting if you notice what’s going on around you. You won’t be as bored and you’ll have more fun.”
What I’m seeing at this age level (18-20) is that not a single one of “my” first-years has understood the idea that it’s supposed to be fun to learn new stuff for its own sake, because we’re human and that’s what our brains like to do. OR, the “new stuff” that we have to show them is so hopelessly alien to their discourse community that….
I no longer know where I’m going with any of this. I just had a LONG week and the Brujo today is at an all-day Arizona teacher competency testing, a mindless piece of thoroughly irrelevant busywork that cost him $200–OMG, if you had been here last night to *hear* the imprecations, the ranting, the cursing, the protestations! We’re both fighting to keep schooling from getting in the way of the education we want to make available. We sit at the breakfast table in the afternoons, exhausted and eating anything that falls into our hands, discussing everything that went horribly wrong and those one or two moments when someone’s light bulb went on and her/his brain momentarily hurt because it was actually *working*. (That includes us, BTW.)
Sometimes we joke about opening a school, which neither of us would voluntarily choose over, say, being gut-shot; but dang it would be an interesting school.
Sooooo….in conclusion……oh dear. I’m no better at this than my students. Entirely apropos of summary, yet somehow integrated with it: I don’t think you’re a good-enough mother. I think you’re a fanfuckingTASTIC mother. Criminy, if *you’d* been my mom, with the thought you’re putting into your children’s happiness and fulfillment? I’d be running the freaking UN by now, or Harvard, or the International Metalworkers Federation, and I’d never spend too much time on the Internet and Pyewacket would never wake me up at 5 am again!
Instead I’m going to wash dishes, vacuum and make something fancy, like enchiladas, so that when the B. comes home his usual weekend chores will be already done. And I’ll read ahead in my comp students’ book so I know what drivel I’ll have to “unpack” (i.e., make comprehensible and faintly palatable) for them in class this week.
I loved John Gatto when I read him. Have you ever chanced across 1) Ira Shor 2) Alfie Kohn? “Jewish communists!” snorts the Brujo in mock-horror…and two of my favorite school-busting radical-pedagogy pushers.
PS What/Who’s a Taylor Main?
PPS Sorry this is so long and rambling!
Whoops…I meant, “two of *our* favorite school-busting etc.”…and I meant, “Taylor Mali.” Who I will now humbly Google.
Love Alfie Kohn, and I play my own glass bead game on my book shelf putting “Punished by Rewards” next to Rosenberg’s “Nonviolent Communication” since the two together have made me really examine how coercive I can want to be as a parent. Will have to look up Ira Shor. Thank you.
Five weeks into school and my third graders have started reading buddies with a kindergarten class. There are tales of how rowdy these kinders are, and then I see it through Soren’s tale and WOW, can we appreciate what all these little ones are going through. It’s a whole new culture with so many new faces and expectations. They’re doing pretty darn well!!! And then I go back in my mind and remember sending you to preschool so you could experience other kids. Coming home we wanted to hear all about it and all you wanted was time to process it all. Like you were even at that point editing your story to fit your audience. I guess it was in kindergarten that we learned to let you watch Sesame Street and veg out a bit. If we were patient then three or four days later we would hear details. I think you were a writer even then and knew the power of your words.
I’m so proud of how seriously you take parenting and living your life. I’m also pretty proud of your boys – they are pretty incredible.
Mom