October 2004
I Hate School!
Too much time spent on homework and pizza parties. Too many pleas for money to make up for cuts in state funding. Too much worry over whether my son is learning enough. I want to be involved in his education, but the demands teachers and principals place on parents these days are ridiculous. That's why, I'm sorry to say . . .
I SEEM TO REMEMBER, AS A CHILD, my mother being overtaken by euphoria each year as summer came to a close. She bought my brothers and me Big Chief tablets and crisp new clothes with abandon; she accepted her carpool duties with gratitude. And why not? After a summer of deploying three kids to swimming lessons, drawing lessons, Spanish lessons, acting lessons, and lessons I'd just as soon forget—masked and padded, I suffered through a fencing camp one July—school was starting at last. She could turn us over with the full confidence that the teachers who were responsible for our education would do their jobs well and—no less important—allow her to go about getting her life back, at least from morning to mid-afternoon.
As a parent of a thirteen-year-old son, those days now seem almost heartbreakingly benign to me. My brothers and I often walked to and from our neighborhood elementary, cognizant of but never really fearing someone called "the Friendly Stranger." Our school served a hot lunch every day that consisted of a meat and two vegetables instead of junk food; we learned enough from publicly supported institutions to attend very good colleges. We did our homework in our rooms, without help. Our teachers were smart—mostly women who today would be doctors and lawyers—and their authority went largely unchallenged, because our neighborhood wasn't then full of anxious parents worried about everything from childhood obesity and ADD and Columbine II to whether their children were learning enough to get into a prestigious college.
In contrast, I seem to be living in an age in which there are two kinds of parents: those who don't care at all and those who care too much. Because I fall into the latter category—not always by choice, as you will see—I often think of my mother's role in my school life with envy, largely because she didn't have one. Maybe she went to the Christmas pageant and an annual parent-teacher conference, but that was it. She worked part-time jobs and volunteered for community projects, but she was there, unfrazzled, when we got home from school. My father, who supported the family on his income, could get away with forcing me to sign a statement promising that he would never again have to attend the PTA's annual Mexican Supper fundraiser, after he endured the first one.
That is not the story of my life. Even though I have a full-time job, I have been right there alongside my son since he started kindergarten, nine years ago, slathering mustard on hormone-filled hot dogs at fall carnivals; soliciting donations for the school auction; serving as room mom and occasional substitute or assistant teacher; shoveling out sand and shoveling in gravel to make the new playground lawsuit-proof; anteing up for teacher coffees, field trips, and capital campaigns; coaching a history fair team (to victory) two years in a row; and of course, helping with homework that required family participation.
So when my mother called the other day and said, "You must be thrilled," after I mentioned that school was starting in a few days, she couldn't have been more wrong. "Thrilled" was not the emotion I was experiencing. Dread was more like it—dread at the commitment of time and the exposure to the problems of schools today that lay ahead. Summer has always been a gift in our house because it has meant an escape from this constant pressure. My son and I have no arguments about going to bed late or getting up early. We watch CSI and try to guess who did it and, near midnight, walk the dog on empty streets, watching steam rise off the pavement after a rain. All that will end in a matter of days, when he heads for the neo-Gothic structure where both he and I will begin eighth grade.
Maybe, in reading the above, you are thinking that I am one of those overly anxious, overly ambitious, "enmeshed" moms satirized on TV sitcoms. One of those parents who take solace in books like Anxious Parents: A History of Modern Childrearing in America or Worried All the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It (whose jacket flap so comfortingly explains: "Whether they're thinking about school violence or getting a child into the right college, American moms and dads are a pretty worried crowd"). I am a worried parent, but not about school violence or whether my child will get into Harvard. I'm worried about whether he is getting a decent education in a chronically ignored and underfunded public school system. I'm worried that the time I have to spend to ensure that he gets what he needs is taking a toll on my work and my family life. Finally, I'm worried that in telling my story of public school, I will expose my son to ridicule and myself to retaliation. I'm not kidding. So think of me as "Mommy X" and of my son as "Oliver," for his—and my—somewhat Dickensian journey through public school. After nine years of service, I'm in grave danger of flunking the rest of my life.
TWO YEARS AGO, WHEN OLIVER was in the sixth grade, I happened to come across a project I had completed when I was his age, in 1966. It was titled "India," and I was amazed at how clear my memories were of completing it. Alone in my room, I had papier-mâchéd and painted a map of the subcontinent and glued it to the cover folder; inside I'd written essays about "The Culture," "The Land," "The Animals," "The Religions." The pieces were all about a page and a half long, written impeccably in bold blue ink with my beloved Schaeffer cartridge pen. I'd supplemented my own illustrations with photographs from the newspaper and National Geographic. I got an A, and from the vantage point of several decades later, I seem to have earned it.
I couldn't help contrasting that project with all the family involvement that has been required of us since Oliver started school, in 1996. Last year, for instance, along with the usual hurdles of working, running a household, and helping a child through the emotional torture chamber that is middle school (one boy demonstrated his sexual prowess by making jokes about the other boys' shoe sizes), there were the semester-long crucibles of the history and science fairs. There was also the hypervigilance about grades in general, since my son must reapply this year to the advanced academic program he's been in since kindergarten, as he had to do when he entered middle school. (His application for sixth grade was as demanding as an Ivy League school's; ten-year-olds had to write essays and take a battery of standardized tests.) Then there was all the volunteering: for the PTA, for a capital campaign to refurbish the school grounds, for the annual fundraising party, for field trips and special events. By the end of the year, stressed to the max, I found myself haranguing my son about not studying for an upcoming history test on the night he was inducted into the National Junior Honor Society. This, clearly, was not the kind of mom I had hoped to be—a combination of Cruella De Vil and the Madwoman of Chaillot.
I didn't start out this way. My husband and I, both products of public schools, were not the kind of people who agonized over post-birth Apgar scores or registered for a chichi kindergarten before their child came home from the hospital. We bought our house in a rapidly gentrifying, close-in neighborhood with the understanding that the nearby public elementary was good and getting even better. It had an advanced program for gifted and talented children, which had been designed by the district a few decades earlier to give smart minority kids a boost and stem white flight from the public schools. At the time, we couldn't imagine sending a child anywhere else. The teachers were enthusiastic, and so were the parents; the school was racially, ethnically, and economically mixed. Even as childless newcomers to the neighborhood, we planted trees on the playground and judged the science fair because the place seemed so warm and inviting. We wanted to be part of that community.
Getting into kindergarten proved to be anything but warm and inviting, however. Admission to the advanced academic program was dependent on passing a standardized test. If our four-year-old failed, neighborhood moms warned me, he would be exiled to "regular classes," which they described as a cross between an Adam Sandler movie and a juvenile detention unit. I was then a much younger, much newer mother, so the test and the potential fallout didn't strike me as patently insane, as it does now.
Instead, we did what all desperate, savvy parents do today: We enrolled our son in the neighborhood nursery school with a prep program—yes, that's a prep program for toddlers—that virtually guaranteed admission to the advanced kindergarten. On test day, we were confident. We strolled the two blocks to the school hand in hand, a tiny, happy family of three, and tried to appear calm and composed as we met the woman who would be deciding Oliver's fate. She was cheerful and bustling, with very red lipstick. Within an hour she returned with Oliver, managing to be both reassuring and noncommittal. I soon found out why: Oliver had passed the test with flying colors—and won the first spot on the waiting list. The competition for kindergarten slots in the advanced program was so intense that, despite our proximity to the school, the district relegated him to a comparable program in an elementary several miles away, with poorer academic standards, for racial balance. When I heard that a neighbor was transferring to Alaska, presumably taking his already accepted five-year-old with him, I did everything but offer to help him pack.
Oliver was formally admitted to his neighborhood public school just a few days before classes started. The Greek chorus of neighborhood moms congratulated me for having volunteered to help plant playground trees and write a few fundraising letters while Oliver was still in diapers. That had probably tipped the scales in our favor, they said. The lesson to me was clear: If I wanted school to work for my son, I had to work for school.
