New goals

The recent New York Times magazine features an article about what New York City private schools are teaching kids. They are teaching optimism, resilience and grit – three traits found to be most important to adult success.

I left New York City in 2006, just as I had paid $10,000 to a consultant to get us into private nursery school for my oldest son. I am not kidding when I tell you that I cashed out my 401K to pay the fee. Don’t tell me it was stupid, okay? I know. But I’m telling you to show you how scared I was that my kid would not get into a good nursery school.

The New York Times reports that it’s tougher to gain admission to these NYC nursery schools than it is to get into Harvard. I believe it. These schools are places I would feel safe sending my kid. But it’s $40,000 a year. For eighteen years. What was I thinking?

Martin Seligman is the guy who’s directing these expensive public schools from his academic perch at Penn. He says grit involves vision, persistence and self-discipline  –  setting a goal and working to it til you get it.

I have no grand plan for how to teach grit. At least not yet. But each day I force myself to get out of bed and face that I have no idea what to do with the kids. I hope for a lot of things each time I do that, and one thing I hope is that I’m modeling grit.

/19 Comments

Evidence

There will be days when I will forget how bad things were. It’s like how people think their psychiatric meds are doing nothing, so they go off them. And then it’s bad.

I can already tell there’s gonna be a time like that for homeschooling.

The manic-depressives have to have a scrapbook of what went wrong — like all the sex partners they had during the last manic episode so they remember that mania is not going to feel as good as they think it might feel.

This post is my scrapbook.

It’s the math sheets my son did on his first days of school.

I called the school and said these are not appropriate for a kid who, according to their own tests, is doing math at a second or third grade level.

The school thought it was fine to give him these worksheets.

I want to remember how hard it must have been for my son to do math so far below him. I want to remember that he was so tuned out in this class that on the question that asked how many triangles are on the line, he colored in two and then wrote one.

/20 Comments

Mall of America

Since we don’t have school anymore, and I can earn a living from anywhere, we went to Mall of America.

I gave a speech at the University of Minnesota’s Business School, and I ended up bringing the kids and spending three days enjoying the fact that the amusement parks are empty during the school day.

My sons went on each ride three hundred times while I answered emails near guard rails and contemplated the expense of homeschooing when you buy two, thirty-dollar wrist bands three days in a row.

Our favorite part of the park was this rope contraption that simulates climbing up the masts of a pirate ship. The kids had safety lines, but they seemed to serve mainly as psychological assurance. There was a park employee whose job was to rescue stuck kids. Since mine were the only ones there, they got private instruction on how to climb all the different types of rope ladders. The boys were so excited to learn something new. And I was so excited to watch someone else teach them.

/3 Comments

Last day of school

My six-year-old made it through three days of school.

Before school started, when I could see that he wanted to go, I asked the school to test him, so the school would be very aware of how far ahead he is. For example, he tested at the end of second grade for math.

On his first day of school, the math he did was circling two balls, and writing the number two. Stuff like that. He brought it home. I said nothing. Although I noticed that after a page of this sort of math, he started making mistakes like writing there is one shoe instead of two shoes.

On the third day of school, I found him in his bed, crying. He said, “I was so excited to go to school and now I’m not excited anymore.”

He said the playground is too scary because there are third and fourth graders and the first graders can’t do anything. He said his best friend got beaten up and no teachers saw.

“What? Beaten up? Like how?”

“His skin got peeled off. Really. I’m not kidding.”

I don’t know about the skin. I’m sure he’s scared, though. The school playground reminds me of Lord of the Flies but without starvation to keep kids focused on the serious issue of hunger.

I called the school to say I am taking him out of school until he gets a differentiated math curriculum.

The school said they thought the math he was doing was okay for him.

So I told them to forget it. He’s not coming back.

/19 Comments

Art class, please

,

I promised myself that I would stop going to the Lego store as a form of entertainment. There is no difference between using video games to take care of the kids and shopping to take care of the kids, except that while both are evil, video games don’t cost money every time we turn to them.

But the Lego store was right there, and I had a brainstorm to buy Lego projects the kids could do next to me while I get a pedicure.

While I was deciding if this idea innovative homeschooling or simply selfishness I realized that I think the two possibilities are actually opposites of each other. And since they are opposites, how will I ever take care of myself again until the boys go to college?

That’s when I spotted the wall of Legos. You can buy endless amounts of Legos in single colors. I imagined my interior design self with a blue shelf made of Legos, a yellow picture frame made of Legos, and I could see replacing our wood ceiling molding with Lego molding. I made extravagant Lego purchases for all three of use, and I told myself we are a homeschooling family growing creatively, together.

/12 Comments

Vacation day

After less than a week of homeschooling I am so excited to have a day to myself that I could cry. I’m spending my days teaching my kids to be independent thinkers while I do not have enough headspace to have thoughts of my own. I miss the wide, expansive thoughts I had in cubicles. I miss the constant worry that I was not spending my days doing things that matter.

/7 Comments

My 9/11 survival story

I was at the World Trade Center when it fell.  It’s a great way to teach history to the kids. Or politics. Or science. To tell the kids I was there, and tell them what it was like.

And after that lesson, I could teach them about resilience. Which I think is probably the most important thing in all of the world to learn  in order to have a good life. I learned about resilience in my 9/11 group for post-traumatic stress.

The thing is, the day was horrifying for me.  And I’ve been doing interviews about 9/11 for the last three months, and each time a TV station came, I shielded my sons from hearing the discussion.

But if I shield the kids from what’s horrible, I will shield them from what we learn from what is horrible.

/5 Comments

Labeling the liars

,

I don’t think single parents can homeschool. I think it’s too scary. (There’s a good discussion about that in the comments on this post.)

According to Shane Krukowski, CEO of Project Foundry, homeschooling is increasing at the rate of 30% per year. And only 38% of homeschoolers today do it for religious reasons. The bulk of homeschoolers are moms who have a college degree and a husband and live in a school district they don’t think is acceptable for their kids.

So this means that

1.     The moms with a college degree and a husband are lying to themselves that the kid’s school is good enough and/or that they cannot homeschool. (Don’t tell me it’s about the money. It’s a bad excuse.)

2.     The school systems should cater to helping single parents and parents without college degrees, because other parents can handle schooling on their own and should stop relying on the public to support them. (A microcosm of this issue is teaching a kid to read.  My friend, Lisa Nielsen, education maven for New York City public schools, explained to me once that kids who have educated parents who read to them do not need to be taught to read — they’ll just learn. The reading programs are only necessary for kids who don’t have educated parents at home reading to them.)

Conclusion: Most moms lie to themselves about school, and then they send their kids there. Me, too, I guess, since I have a kid in public school. It’s hard to make a good decision when public schools are the best all-day babysitting program in the world, and homeschooling demands so much time and energy from the parent doing it.

/28 Comments

About, cross, after

My son came home with a list of words. The goal is for all first graders to read that list by the end of the year. He read the list out loud while he ate his after-school snack.

I was so upset that I offered him another bowl of ice cream so we didn’t have to talk.

I thought I would have fear that I wasn’t teaching my homeschooled son well enough. But all my worries are for the boy who’s in school.

/27 Comments

Friday my son went to school

,

It happened so fast.  I called a consultant to help me teach math, and she was very gung-ho on trying the school. The same day, I met with the school to tell them I’m homeschooling, and I felt scared to lose the only part of the community I have gotten to know during the year I’ve lived in rural America.

Then my six-year-old had a crying fit that he hates living on the farm. Maybe it is because he is sick of me fighting with my husband. My son said we could live in the city and see my husband once a week just like we see my ex husband – my son’s birth dad – once a week. My son painted a city picture of a parade of dads.

He also said he wants to be able to walk to friends’ houses again. Not that he ever did that. We never lived in a house long enough for him to make a friend. He’s moved five times in six years. So of course he thinks it’s time to move.

So I deal with the friends part of the problem and I put him in school. He asked to go. He said he wanted to be with other kids.

I know a hard-core homeschooler would say, “The parent decides.” But I didn’t have the guts. Or the heart. Or the brains. I don’t know what I was missing.

/23 Comments