School

This year I have been struggling a lot with the big boys' school. (Reed's school is still awesome--caring and nurturing teachers who love him and give him so many opportunities to grow and develop.) We were so excited for them to get in to this school 18 months ago because we had heard so many great things about it from neighbors and because the neighborhood school seemed a little chaotic when the boys went there for pre-k. But in the last six months I have begun to feel more conflicted about where they have been going.

One, homework. At the end of the school year I felt intense relief about school being over. Part of it was that I got to have my kids to myself for a few months to have fun with and enjoy and get to know, and part of it was that I knew they needed a break from the routine of the school year, and part of it was HOMEWORK. Almost every day (Monday-Thursday) last year, Theo and Beckett had 5-15 minutes of homework. Sometimes they had projects that took significantly longer, which they sometimes got a weekend to complete and sometimes were assigned Monday or Tuesday and due Friday. Now, I know that 5-15 minutes does not sound onerous. But. On a school night when I pick them up from afterschool at 5:30, and they have been at school under the thumb of some adult or another since 8:30 in the morning, and bring them home so that I can make dinner in the 15 minutes before we have to eat so that we can then clean up and get upstairs to take baths and read books and get in bed by 8pm, making them sit down and do that tiny bit of homework became more than I could handle. The battle to make them get out their folders and get the supplies they needed to do the homework and figure out what in hell this Common Core homework is even supposed to mean WHILE making dinner in 15 minutes and spending some time with Reed, who I also haven't seen all day, was just too much. Then one of us had to sign on at least two different sheets of paper for each child, acknowledging homework or behavior logs or whatever. It was simply a battle I did not want to have, and I dreaded it every night. Sometimes they did homework at school, or grandparents helped out, but it always felt like I had to check over to make sure every piece of paper was removed from the backpack or initialed or double-checked. There were many many nights when we cut out reading books, or going on a family walk, or going out for ice cream, because we did not have time after finishing homework. Which is crazy.

This summer, as the days got shorter and the start of another school year loomed, I began to dread the homework. I dreaded having every moment with my kids on the weeknights be governed by a schedule with no wiggle room. I dreaded telling my tired, crabby, hungry kids who just wanted to come home and run around in the backyard or play with their toys that they had to instead come and sit down at the table and do their homework. I have read some of the articles about homework not being useful or effective for children at least under the age of 13, and I have read the viral missives from parents who had enough and told their kids' teachers that they would no longer be doing homework. I just didn't want to take that big of a stand, and I didn't want to be telling teachers that what they were doing wasn't supported by research and that I knew better. I just didn't want to go there. So at the start of the school year, I started talking to other parents, hesitantly, about my struggle with homework. Other parents agreed with me, sometimes enthusiastically, but no one had dared tell "Latin" that their "scholars" wouldn't be doing homework this year.

I started slow. I emailed the teachers to ask for forgiveness in advance for missing some nights of homework, hoping to feel out their tolerance and understanding. I got pretty much nothing--the teachers said that the kids' homework shouldn't be onerous, only 10-15 minutes a night. I tried again, asking if we could have a little wiggle room to either have homework come in a couple days late so we can work on it over the weekend, or get assignments early so that we can keep ahead and get homework in on time. Again the answer came back, no. The homework would be due on the day it was due, the day after it was assigned, and though we could turn it in later, the kids wouldn't get credit unless it was turned in on time. So. Not the flexibility and understanding that I was hoping for. Thus, I am done with homework. Jeff does it sometimes, and Grandma Joanie and Grandpa Stu do it pretty religiously, and afterschool encourages it pretty hard. But I can say, it is super freeing not to think about it on a daily basis.

Two, the rest of the school. So when we were applying, Latin touted the parent involvement at the school. Said they welcomed parents and wanted a high degree of parent help to make the school run. It turns out that what they want is for us to do the kids' homework and projects at home, and raise money for the PTO, and then shut the hell up about anything else. This year they've discontinued room parents, so there are no parents communicating with other parents on behalf of a given classroom. The teachers may from time to time ask for particular help, like to come in and read on a Friday at 9:15am,  but besides that we have no role. I know that Theo and Beckett were littler when they were at our neighborhood school in pre-k 4, and that Reed was tiny and much more portable, but I was in the kids' classrooms at least once a week, helping with some project or accompanying on a field trip or a walk around the neighborhood. At Latin they actively discourage parents from even coming to the classroom to drop kids off or pick up. It's a yucky feeling. It might be more palatable if I felt like they knew what they were doing and I trusted their instructional and philosophical knowledge, but some of this stuff I just disagree with. The most annoying part to my Ithaca City School District-educated self is that these folks have all the elitism and self-righteousness of the parents I grew up knowing, but with none of the education or intellectual vigor or thoughtfulness about class and race. Some of the parents I have met are just straight up racists who don't want their kids going to regular city schools, and it was either Latin or a private school to get them the heck out. The message I hear all the time is "oooh, our kids are special little gifted snowflakes who need special enriched instruction because they are so special and gifted and could not possibly have their needs met at regular schools." But you know what? My kids still pick their noses and say "poop" a hundred times a day and wrestle and write their numbers backwards sometimes. As Jeff says, "my scholars can't wipe their own butts yet." They're just regular kids. And the last thing I want them to absorb is that they are somehow better than the kids who go to the neighborhood school or any other school or unschool.

Three, the non-neighborhood school. Our neighborhood school, Roberts, is around the corner from our house. At dismissal time, parents park in front of our school to pick their kids up from classrooms. The front of the school is a meeting point for parents in the neighborhood at drop off and pick up times. There are lots of community activities (picnics, ice cream nights, game nights, performance nights, movie nights) sponsored by the PTO that lots of different people go to. When Theo and Beckett went there, we just ate dinner and walked over to the school. It was always welcoming, there were always neighborhood people we knew, and I always felt at home there. When I go to Latin, I feel like I am in someone else's space, afraid I am breaking some unwritten rule. The PTO meeting I went to a couple weeks ago with Mama Sara (who I am sure I embarrassed because I could NOT just shut up; I'm sorry, Mama Sara!) was just awful. These PTO moms (exclusively moms) presented a budget in which they proposed to retroactively separate out each class's fundraising and keep all monies in separate class-specific pots from now on. It seemed like many of those of us new to the Latin PTO thought this to be a strange way to organize PTO monies, rather than keeping all the money in one pot and drawing from it as different classes needed. The whole tenor of the meeting was yucky and anxious and uninspired. The truth is, you could bring me to any meeting at any time and I could think of questions to pose and fights to pick but this is my kids' school, and in every way and at every opportunity I feel excluded and frustrated and not good enough. And at our neighborhood school, I just never felt like that. There were things they did that I thought were kind of dumb but I understood the reasons behind it and I felt like people could acknowledge the dumbness and say, yes, well, we have to do it this way. Which I found human. This Latin place is not a kind or an inclusive place.

The bottom line is that we are here for now, with no promises past this year. I love that they teach Spanish (starting in kindergarten) and have these enrichment classes that kids can pick from. I really like a lot of their kids in their classes. I think a lot of the teachers are great, and many of the parents. And so we have to figure out whether the good outweighs the bad.