In Which Virtual School is Not the Epic Disaster I Feared It Would Be

 When schools were closed here on March 13th, teachers were basically given no notice. The hope was the we would return to school the second week of April after spring break. The district sent home a flyer with suggested activities by grade level, but none of it was required. Kittygirl's teachers sent home their math workbooks and a few other things. Squirrelboy's teachers didn't sent home anything. I actually made my kids do something educational for those first two weeks before spring break, more for my sake than theirs because I didn't want to deal with bored kids all day long. I think most kids played video games for three weeks.

Once remote school, or NTI (nontraditional instruction) as it's called here in Kentucky, did start, it was pretty much a flop. I truly believe the teachers were trying, but they were coming into it with no prep and no training. Kittygirl hated NTI and learned nothing.

As this summer got underway and virus transmission rates went up instead of down, it finally became obvious to the school system that starting school in person was not going to happen. They made a commitment to get Chromebooks for every student in the district (they're still short 10,000, and they started the school year three weeks ago short a lot more because it seems most districts in the nation are ordering Chromebooks right now). They also bought districtwide license for Zoom (which has itself made improvements since the spring) and invested in training the teachers to teach virtually.

We're on day 12 now. It isn't perfect, but it's been a million times better than I thought it would be. One super helpful thing is that I expanded our pandemic bubble to bring in a classmate for Kittygirl. It's a service to her family because both of her parents are working from home and they were going crazy with two kids at home in the spring. It's a service to our family because Kittygirl is more motivated when she has a classmate with her and she has someone to play with on breaks and when she finishes her work. I even got them matching baskets to keep their school supplies in.

They have zoom meetings for most of the morning, starting at 9 and ending at noon, with some breaks in between. Since they attend a Spanish immersion school, they switch off every other day having their primary zoom block with the English teacher or the Spanish teacher. On alternate days they have a shorter half hour zoom with the other teacher. After a break for lunch and recess (the nice playset Mr. Engineer built when Squirrelboy was little is getting more use than it has in years) they have work to do in Google Classroom and/or SeeSaw (another educational platform). They have to spend at least 20 minutes each doing online math and reading, and then they watch a video made by one of the specials teachers and record their own video in response. I also make them read for 20 minutes. All told, they usually about 90 minutes of work in the afternoon, sometimes more if they take forever to to their specials videos. They sometimes to multiple takes because they want them to be perfect. The classmate, whom I have just now decided to name Pandagirl because she's wearing a panda dress today, is picked up at 4pm and they usually have at least an hour after schoolwork is done to play together. Also, every Friday (except today, which they're treating as a Monday because we were off for Labor Day this past Monday) is a catch up day with just one fun zoom meeting, so they normally only have an hour or so of work to finish after that and are done by lunchtime.

I feel like Kittygirl and Pandagirl have a good balance of direct instruction and independent work. They're learning new things and mostly enjoying school. I don't think Squirrelboy's schedule is as well balanced. Normally they have five classes a day. You would think they could just have those five classes every day via Zoom, but for some reason they've pulled together a weird schedule in which there are 3 classes M/W and 2 classes T/TH. T/TH the first class isn't until 11am. Fridays they have a zoom with their advisory class (it might be called homeroom elsewhere) and then a catchup day. On the bright side, I do feel like the content being presented is as good as it was in person last year. However, I don't think there will be nearly enough time for the teachers to present everything and the students to learn everything if they continue meeting only twice a week for all or most of the semester. Since his school covers in a semester what many schools take a year to cover, that means, for example, that his geometry teacher is supposed to cover it all in 30 lessons. Yeah, I'm sure that will be super effective.

My one concern with Kittygirl and Pandagirl is that they're not getting nearly as much Spanish immersion as they get during a normal school year. Their Spanish will definitely not be at the level it would normally be at by the end of the year. I console myself with the fact that every single Spanish immersion student in the district is in the same boat, so future teachers are bound to be understanding. I also don't think there's a way to do it that's significantly better than what they're doing.

A couple months ago I was seriously considering pulling Kittygirl out of school and homeschooling her this year. I know parents who have made the decision to homeschool for the year instead of doing virtual school or risking sending their kids back in person and I fully support that choice. However, I am pleasantly surprised to report that I have never seriously considered homeschool since I saw this fall's version of virtual school in action. It's not perfect, and I still contend that organized unschooling would be a better use of our time and energy this school year, but, given that there was no way the school system was buying into that idea, I'm pleasantly surprised by the outcome so far.

In Which Virtual Is Actually Pretty Good

If you had told me six months ago that my 9 year old would be using Zoom regularly this year I would have believed you. Then the pandemic hit, and most of us started using Zoom or some other video meeting interface pretty often. Our first experiences were kind of mediocre. Her teachers had a weekly class Zoom meeting, but it was poorly attended and not that engaging. Random kids in her grade would have their parents set up a Zoom meeting so that they could talk to their friends. Some parents set up meetings with grand intentions for the kids to speak Spanish with each other, but that never happened. Kittygirl tried one of those meetings, but it was set up by a boy and she was the only girl who joined. She left the meeting after just a few minutes. 

Virtual school as a whole was pretty unimpressive this spring. I don't blame the teachers. This was thrown on them very suddenly. They were provided with no training. They were also told they were not allowed to lower students' grades during the last 9 weeks when we had to go virtual and that they couldn't introduce new content. It was a pretty terrible set of circumstances.

Our first positive virtual experience was with a virtual Cub Scout campout in April. There was a whole schedule of suggested activities with the opportunity to share what you were doing via Facebook, plus Facebook live events where you could interact with others. Frankly, the planning was better than some in person campouts we've attended. We even had a real campfire in the backyard during the closing campfire program.

This summer everything the kids had planned to do was cancelled, but we managed to have some really impressive virtual experiences. We were particularly sad that FFL Orlando, the amazing diabetes conference that we've attended for the last two summers, had to go virtual.this year. However, it was actually done extremely well. They even had virtual versions of the Thursday evening banquet and the Saturday social events. One of the best parts of FFL is connecting with other parents of kids with diabetes and adults living with diabetes, and the organizers did their best to recreate those random connections by having virtual "hallways" - Zoom meetings that you could join at any time  between 8am and 8pm. 

It was disappointing that kid and adult sessions alternated during the virtual conference so I had to find something for Kittygirl to do during my sessions, but I understood practically why they did this. Many families simply don't have enough devices for multiple family members to be on Zoom at the same time.  Both the kid and adult sessions themselves, however, were quite good. I figured the adult sessions, that are often lecture type presentations would be pretty easy to translate to a digital environment, but I doubted the kid sessions would fare as well. To my great surprise, Kittygirl absolutely loved her first year in the Tween group even though it was virtual. They did an amazing number of fun activities along with learning some things about diabetes and meeting some famous people with diabetes. They even made "carb creatures" out of food and showed them off.

FFL was just one of several positive virtual experiences we've had this summer. Kittygirl also did a virtual diabetes camp that was surprisingly good. The week of the virtual FFL conference and for a week after that we were isolating as much as possible so we could safely visit my parents, so we signed each kid up for a week of virtual camp the second week. They were both excellent. 

Squirrelboy did a Cyber Film Camp with the Verdugo Hills BSA council, which is based in California in the heart of the moviemaking industry. He got to learn from professionals who do the kinds of things he hopes to do for a living, and he managed to cooperate with a group of 7 other scouts from 4 different states to make a short film. All the films made by the campers were shown in a film festival this Sunday, and I was really impressed. Squirrelboy's film even won the audience award, which was voted on by the Zoom seminar attendees.

Kittygirl did a virtual camp with Lexington Children's Theater. She at first wasn't excited about the idea, but then I told her it was based on a Percy Jackson book, which she is obsessed with, so she agreed. For three hours every day over Zoom the kids rehearsed a short play and then they presented it via Zoom on Friday. It was kind of surreal to have the kids saying their lines on camera in their homes instead of together on a stage, but it was amazingly good despite that. As a bonus, my in-laws who almost never visit and my brother who lives in Germany were able to join the Zoom meeting and watch Kittygirl's play. That never would have happened if it had been a normal end of camp presentation.

This year has not been what we expected. It looks likely that it will continue like this at least until the spring of 2020. Sometimes this makes me really angry. I'm particularly angry that the government in the U.S. has done a really pathetic job reacting to this pandemic. However, lots of individual organizations have really stepped up and embraced this unusual time. So many new people signed up for the virtual version of FFL that the organizers have committed to having a virtual version even when the in person version is safe again (hopefully that will be 2021, but all bets are off at this point). The Verdugo Hills council is planning to do the Cyber Film Camp again next summer. My husband's company is investigating allowing employees to work from home in come cases long term. I think this pandemic is going to fundamentally change the way we do some things, and in many cases it will be for the better.

These positive experiences are why, even though our spring experience of virtual school was pretty pathetic, I'm cautiously optimistic about what it could look like in the fall. Our district has announced that we will begin two weeks later than originally planned, on August 26, and that school will be virtual only at least until the end of September, at which point local conditions will be reevaluated. If we do go back later in the fall it will be part time to begin with and 1-3 days a week will still be virtual. This time, there has been more time to prepare, it is expected that new content will be presented, and the superintendent says that work will be differentiated. I have a healthy skepticism about how this will go, and am mentally preparing to pull Kittygirl and homeschool her if she's as miserable as she was in the spring, but for the time being I'm giving everyone the benefit of the doubt. Overall, virtual is normally not as good as in person. However, I have experience really well done virtual and really poorly done virtual. Here's hoping that school this fall is closer to the former.

In Which Crisis Schooling Is Not The Same Thing as Homeschooling

So much has changed since I last posted about the coronavirus pandemic. The news changes every single day, it seems. For the record, I am still not any more worried about Kittygirl getting covid-19 than I am about any member of my immediate family. If anything, I’m a little more worried about me or Mr. Engineer getting it. Though neither of us has a chronic health condition, neither of us is in as good of physical shape as Kittygirl, and the fact is there are many more people in their 40’s getting very sick and dying than there are kids.

What we’re mainly focused on right now is working and learning at home. The last day of school for the kids was March 13th. The first announcement was that they would return on April 6th, after spring break. Then that was changed to April 20th. The latest word is that schools in Kentucky are closed at least through May 1st. However, I’ll be shocked if they return to the school building this year. I think our governor just likes to take things in slow steps as opposed to closing schools for the rest of the year in one fell swoop as many other governors have done.

Mr. Engineer began working at home on March 16th, the same day the kids began learning at home. Luckily for him, the project he’s currently working on only required him to bring home a little bit of equipment and would have been done mostly in his office under normal circumstances. His coworkers who were working mainly in the lab had it much harder. He has set up his home office in Squirrelboy’s room, using a table we normally use to serve food when we have a lot of people over for a cookout.

In Kentucky, school systems are allowed to apply to do something called “nontraditional instruction”  (NTI for short) on days when it is not possible to meet in the school building. This means that students are given work online or paper packets to complete so that such days can be counted as school days and don’t need to be made up. Under normal circumstances, this happens just a handful of times a year on snow days.

For whatever reason, our district has never done NTI, which means we sometimes go into June making up snow days. However, when it became clear that schools would need to be closed for an extended period of time, every school district was allowed to apply for emergency NTI status. Since our district had never done NTI before, there was a steep learning curve. On the 13th, all students were sent home with a brochure suggesting “unplugged” learning activities in each subject for their grade level. Some teachers also sent home additional work. Ironically, my third grader brought home quite a bit and my 9th grader was only given a book to read and told to finish an already started project for math.

Officially, the first week of school closure was NTI days and the second week was “snow days.” The third was spring break. Kittygirl had enough A lot of other parents I know (many, but not all, of whom were either working from home or still going into work) were overwhelmed those first two weeks. A lot of memes were passed around social media about homeschool parents suddenly being seen as superheroes or homeschool parents as mafia bosses telling public school parents “Welcome to the family.”

The thing is, though, we weren’t really homeschooling. As a former homeschooler, I can testify that real homeschooling bears little resemblance to suddenly having to educate your child when school is closed due to a global pandemic. Homeschoolers plan out their year ahead of time. They choose the curriculum they use. They are also normally involved in a homeschool community. They often do classes at a homeschool cooperative one or two days a week. They meet other homeschoolers at the park. They go on field trips. Maybe they meet up with another homeschool family to do a science experiment together.

None of these things apply to what public school parents are now being asked to do. We didn’t plan to facilitate our children's learning at home. We, in fact, had almost no warning about it. We’re not choosing what to teach them. And even people who were already homeschooling can no longer gather with other homeschoolers, be it at a coop, at a park, or at someone’s home.

In our case, the first two weeks weren’t too bad. Kittygirl worked on the math packet and read the book she’d been sent home with. Squirrelboy read the book he had been sent home with, worked on his math project, and did a lot more work than he otherwise would have on the three merit badges he has left to earn his eagle rank in Boy Scouts. He also started a series of short films with theme of going outside and being active.

In addition, the kids spent a lot of time outside. I took them several times a week to a park on the other side of town that has mountain biking trails. As you may remember, mountain biking is one of Squirrelboy’s favorite things. Kittygirl was turned off of mountainbiking last summer when Squirrelboy took her on a trail that she wasn’t quite ready for and she fell. However, she decided to give it another try and she loved it.

As I said, the first two weeks weren’t too bad. I imagine they would still have been stressful if I were trying to work from home or if I had to go into work. Since I don’t work for pay right now, I’m able to dedicate a lot of time to the kids. I had actually just started sending off my first novel to agents and started work on my second, but the second can wait, and, if I actually get interest from an agent and need to do some editing on my novel I’ll figure out how to fit it in.

The beauty of the first two weeks was that the kids had minimal work that had been assigned by the school so, even though it wasn’t the same as homeschooling, it had some of the advantages. Kittygirl had time to do fun science experiments and watch educational videos. Squirrelboy had time to make some movies.

The teachers spent those two weeks training to teach via NTI and making plans. This has been the first official week of NTI, and it has been less than smooth. In fact, at times it has been downright torturous. The good news is that Squirrelboy’s school was pretty well positioned to start NTI. Nearly all assignments and teacher communication already came through Canvas, and most assignments were submitted through Canvas. The bad news is, the teachers are mostly assigning the kinds of work they assigned on days when they had a  sub. Squirrelboy generally hated that type of work and was never able to finish it in one class period thanks to his ADHD and dyslexia, so he’s been struggling with it. Kittygirl’s school was using SeeSaw Family for students to share some of their work with their families, so they decided to present NTI work using SeeSaw Classroom. They’re also using the web versions of their Math and Reading programs. There has been a steep learning curve for this. In fact, so many people complained about the math that the teacher suspended its use after Tuesday to reevaluate it and assigned work on IXL. The good news is, IXL is easy to use. The bad news is, Kittygirl hates it.

Gone are the lazy days when the kids could spend most of their time choosing what they learned about. I don’t blame the teachers. They’re doing their best in a bad situation. In many ways this is harder for them than it is for the students. They’re losing what is usually the best part of the year with this class of students. They miss them like crazy. And frequently they’re trying to help their own kids with online learning while doing online teaching.

I’ve seen a lot of complaining on social media about the work kids are being given during this time. I’ve even seen parents say they’re choosing not to have their kids do the work and encouraging others to rebel and declare the school year over or to file as homeschoolers for the remainder of the year and do whatever they want with their kids.

Educationally, that would be totally fine. Yes, the kids will miss some content, but it’s nothing they can’t catch up with when they’re able to return to school. Procedurally, it could be a big mess. Your child could be counted as truant and you could get in trouble. Or if you file as a homeschooler you might have to jump through a lot of hoops to enroll your child back in school in the fall. I know from enrolling Squirrelboy in high school after homeschooling for middle school that it was a tedious and annoying process for which I had to provide a lot of paperwork including a schedule that we didn’t actually follow every day and a transcript for which I had to go back and estimate grades because we didn’t actually assign grades.

We’re now on day 5 of real NTI. For Kittygirl it has gotten steadily better, but some of it is still tedious and feels pretty worthless. She tells me frequently that she wishes we could just go back to doing what we were doing the first two weeks. For Squirrelboy, it remains frustrating and tedious. He’s been able to keep his grades up and complete the work, but he’s basically getting everything he doesn’t like about school and none of what he likes, which is particularly sad for someone like him who had a mediocre experience at best during his public school years before high school.

For those of you who are in the trenches with me helping your kids trudge through their online work or worksheets sent home, I salute you. For those of you who are working on the front lines in healthcare and essential industries and hoping your kids get their work done, you are heroes.  Everyone in the world is going through the same crisis right now, but it doesn’t look the same for everyone. For some people in some places, it’s a hurricane. For others, like my family, it’s more of a gentle rainshower. Yes, it’s annoying we’d rather be going about our normal lives out in the sunshine. However, it’s not a tragedy. Mr. Engineer still has a job, and his company is committed to keeping everyone employed. To do this, they’ve given everyone a 20% pay cut, but this isn’t a financial hardship for us. Though it gives me little time for myself, I have the time and ability to help my kids with their work. The kids miss their activities, but it’s actually been nice to have more time in the evening to go on walks and play games together as a family. None of us have gotten sick, and, if we do, we have good odds because of our ages and good overall health.

Our biggest challenge is slogging through the kids’ work.What we are doing, however, absolutely does not fit the definition of homeschooling. Homeschooling is one of many good ways to educate your kids. Crisis schooling at home, however, is what we have to do right now, but absolutely not an ideal way for kids to be educated long term.

In Which I Am Greatly Surprised By My Dyslexic's Favorite High School Class

Due to a combination of dyslexia making reading a writing a lot of work for his brain, ADHD making it difficult for him to a) concentrate in the school environment and b) force himself to be interested in the writing prompts his teachers gave him, Squirrelboy came out of elementary school basically hating to write. In the state writing test he took at the end of fifth grade, he scored on the novice level. That's the lowest score possible. I don't think his teachers were incompetent. The methods they employed worked to teach a majority of their students to write well. However, they did not work for Squirrelboy. Unfortunately, what they did was make him hate writing.

When I started homeschooling Squirrelboy, I approached language arts in general and writing in particular as slowly and gently as a I possibly could. The writing for the first program I tried involved the rewriting of fables, which is a hallmark of a particular stage within classical education, a style that is very popular within Christian homeschool circles in particular. The idea is that the student learns to write by imitating good models. There is nothing wrong with that model for the right student. However, Squirrelboy was not the right student. He hated it with the burning passion of a thousand suns. It turns out they had spent a brief amount of time in fifth grade rewriting fables, and the idea of spending an entire school year rewriting fables was anathema to him. I decided to back off the fable rewriting and just focus on the other parts of the program, which made it at least slightly palatable to him.

I hunted around for another writing program and landed on Susan Wise Bauer's Writing With Skill series. This is another curriculum from the classical education viewpoint, but it approaches the teaching of writing in a very methodical manner, teaching students to notice key details in reading, write summaries (well, actually narrations, but they're similar), make outlines, and eventually write paragraphs about a nonfiction topic. This program didn't create a lot of excitement around writing for Squirrelboy, but he didn't hate it. We used it on and off from the end of 6th grade all the way through the end of 8th grade and he definitely gained some valuable skills from it.

Through a friend and neighbor who has homeschooled all of her kids, most of whom have learning differences, I learned about the Bravewriter program. This is a language arts program started by a homeschooling mom and professional writer that focuses not so much on developing specific skills in a methodical manner as helping a child find their own writing voice and making language arts in general and writing in particular an enjoyable, joyful experience. First I borrowed the basic handbook of the program, The Writer's Jungle, and took Squirrelboy through the process detailed in it. It wasn't a cure all for his hatred of writing, but it was a nice break from the useful but fairly dull skill work in Writing With Skill. Two things we picked up that we used regularly were freewriting, in which Squirrelboy wrote for a set number of minutes about any topic he chose, with no attention needing to be paid to grammar or spelling. This helped him begin to get over his fear of doing writing wrong. Not directly related to writing, we also began to have regular poetry teas, during which we would enjoy a treat together and read poetry to each other. This time gave him an appreciation for a style of writing he previously disliked, though it didn't make him fall in love with writing poetry.

As 8th grade approached, I knew I had to prepare Squirrelboy to write for others. I attempted to do that by a) signing him up for two Bravewriter online classes and b) putting him in a writing class at our homeschool coop. Both were good experiences for him, but the online classes were particularly valuable. Having feedback from a professional writer on what he did right in his writing and how he could improve and having very concrete steps to follow to complete a specific project on a topic he chose was very helpful to him. He came out of 8th grade still not really liking writing, but not hating it, and able to do it competently when he was willing to put the work in.

Even with all the work I did over three years of homeschooling Squirrelboy and in 8th grade in particular, I was still nervous about how his freshman English class would go. He had had fairly limited experience writing for others, and none of that writing had been for a real grade. I was afraid that he would get overwhelmed by the requirements of the class and shut down. To my great astonishment, the exact opposite has happened. English is Squirrelboy's favorite class by far, and, while he's doing fairly well in all his classes, he's doing astonishingly well in English. His teacher has used his work as an example for other students (amazingly, this does not seem to have made the other students hate Squirrelboy). How has this miracle occurred? It's all about a passionate, supportive teacher who drew Squirrelboy in from day one, engaged him, and made him care about doing his best work all the time. That's the thing about people with ADHD. It's not that they can't concentrate. It's that they have a harder time than the average person concentrating on something if they don't care about it. If they're passionate about something, they can, in fact, give even more to it than someone with a typical brain. Squirrelboy's teacher has, to my great astonishment, made him passionate about the writing for his class. The other thing he has done is to choose assignments that are applicable to the real world and that show Squirrelboy and other students that being able to write well is a valuable skill for life. Squirrelboy has spend the past several weeks writing a grant proposal that will actually be presented to a community foundation and may result in funding for a drone for the journalism club (which the amazing English teacher also encouraged Squirrelboy to join).

In the interest of full disclosure, I should note that Squirrelboy's new passion for writing has not transferred to his other classes. He has had to do a decent amount of writing for both Health and Civics, and he has complained loudly about it. However, he has at least done it competently. Perhaps in another year of high school a different teacher will get Squirrelboy excited about their subject and he'll be able to transfer the passion for writing well that his English teacher is fanning into flame.

There are a lot of successful people in this world with ADHD and/or Dyslexia. What most, perhaps even all, of those people have in common is that someone, at some point in their life, believed in them and pushed them to do their best and pursue what they were passionate about, even if it was hard. Mr. Engineer and I have always tried to do that for Squirrelboy, but it's always better for parents to have other adults in their child's life as partners in this effort. Squirrlboy's Freshman English teacher is proving to be a great one.

In Which It Is Okay That My Dyslexic Has Not Read All the Classics

I am a bookworm. I had read my way through most of the children's section at the library by middle school, and, while I sometimes took to reading rather questionable novels (V.C. Andrews, anyone?) I often picked up classic novels in my teens. I was one of the few people in high school English class who truly enjoyed The Great Gatsby. I went on to read a good deal of Fitzgerald's work. Sometime in about 7th grade, as I remember, I read A Christmas Carol for the first time. I'd seen movie versions, of course, but the book pulled me in, and I actually listed Charles Dickens as my favorite author on some kind of survey I filled out at school. I read my way through much of the work of Dickens, though I must admit I didn't always understand it. I fell in love with Hemingway after reading The Old Man and the Sea for English class and made my way through most of his work in high school as well. I'm not sure how it took me so long, but in college I started on Jane Austen, who introduced me to another side of Britain and cemented my identity as an anglophile.

Despite my occasional forays into questionable literature, I always presumed I would introduce my children to the classics at a young age and they would also devour them. As you may remember if you've read my first post on the subject of books, my children are not exactly bookworms. However, I have reconciled myself to that fact for the most part, and have tried to give Squirrelboy especially (because I still have some hope that Kittygirl will get over her graphic novel phase and pick up a copy of Jane Austen at the least in her teens) exposure to what I learned from the classics in other ways. I handed him a few graphic novel versions of classic novels when I was homeschooling him in middle school. I found others on audio, and surprisingly, he occasionally did too. He actually willingly listened to Robert Louis Stevenson's Kidnapped of his own free will when he was about ten years old. It was so full of Jacobite politics that I barely understood a word, but for some weird reason he ate it up.

He also managed to become an anglophile as I did in early adolescence, first through the British car show Top Gear (to this day he refers to the windscreen instead of the windshield of a car), and later through Downtown Abbey. I introduced him to Agatha Christie a couple years ago and read Murder on the Orient Express to him before taking him to see the latest movie version. Now he's obsessed with Agatha Christie audiobooks and checks them out regularly to listen to on his phone. We went to see the Downtown Abbey movie at the theater tonight, and, as in several movies we've seen together, he managed to lower the median age by at least a decade. He understood and laughed at all the right places, and we both loved the movie. All that while closely analyzing the cinematography, which was apparently perfect.

Despite not being exposed to the classics in the same way I was, my son has managed to grow up with a taste for high culture and for things not of the present moment, while still being very much a 21st century teenager. I only hope I can manage the same for my daughter.

In Which I Have a Complicated Relationship with the Public School System

When I was young, idealistic, and childless, I was certain that I would never consider having my children educated anywhere other than the public schools. In principle, I believe very strongly in the American public school system.  Historically speaking, it's a provocative and amazing thing that a nation would provide, free of charge, an education for all the children (both boys and girls) residing within its borders. This even applies to non-citizen children and those without legal residency. It is a revolutionary idea, looking at history, and even many parts of the world today, that, by law, even children with special needs are guaranteed a free and appropriate public education.

Sure, I knew that the system was not problem free. I knew there was a focus on testing that I didn't like. I knew that not all schools were high achieving like the affluent suburban school system from which I graduated.  However, I figured that any minor problems we might encounter could be overcome by good parents who were committed to being involved in their childrens' education. I figured, if my hypothetical children had any problems at all, they would be social, not academic, because I figured my children would be like me - bright but not particularly socially adept.

My rosy view of the public school system was not tested at all by Squirrelboy's first encounter with our local public school. He was behind in speech and qualified first for state provided early intervention and then (starting on his third birthday) public preschool at our local elementary school. He loved every minute of it. His teacher and his speech therapist were both amazing, and I was confident that he would continue to thrive there in kindergarten and beyond.

Then Squirrelboy started kindergarten and it all went downhill. Despite the fact that we had done everything we were supposed to do to build "prereading" skills, he wasn't learning letters at the rate he was expected to, let alone associating them with sounds. I looked up the signs of dyslexia, and he had every single one. I shared my suspicions wit his teacher, but she assured me that he was too young to be diagnosed with dyslexia. She said that for some kids, especially boys, iti just takes a little while for reading to click. She assured me that, after Christmas, a key would turn in his brain and he'd suddenly take off in reading. Even when it didn't happen right after Christmas, his teacher continued to dismiss our concerns. This happened consistently right up until the spring conference, at which she told us that reading just wasn't clicking for Squirrelboy and she thought he would benefit from "an extra year of primary" (eduspeak for repeating kindergarten). It was at that point that we sought and outside evaluation for dyslexia and then started tutoring after school two days a week. We insisted that Squirrelboy be moved on to first grade, not believing that another year of the methods that failed to teach him to read the first time around would miraculously have a different effect the second time.

About a third of the way into first grade I first started looking into homeschooling. Squirrelboy was miserable. Every Sunday at bedtime he would cry because he had to endure another week of school. In addition to not reading at the level he was expected to (despite making steady progress with the tutor), he had a very difficult time living up to the behavior expectations. He was constantly being told to "move his bee down to yellow" for various minor infractions, and it broke his heart that he never got to participate in the special experiences given to students who were easily able to meet the behavior expectations. We brought up with his teacher that we thought he might have ADHD, but, just like with his kindergarten teacher, our concerns were dismissed out of hand. He wasn't excessively disruptive, so surely he couldn't have ADHD. Some kids, especially boys, we were told, just take a little longer to mature. Just give him time, he'll learn to manage his behavior.

Had it been up to me, I would have pulled Squirrelboy out of school to homeschool during, or, at the latest, after first grade, but Mr. Engineer was not on board at the time. He made a reasonable point that it would be difficult to concentrate on homeschool with a toddler underfoot (Kittygirl was one at the time). He is the son of two public school teachers, and his commitment to the public school system was even stronger than mine. So we continued. After first grade, things in improved a bit. Squirrelboy was reading on grade level by third grade and finished the tutoring program by the end of fourth grade. He still had problems focusing and struggled with any subject that involved lots of details, especially math, but his teachers consistently dismissed us when we brought up ADHD as a possibility.

During his 5th grade year we had to make a decision about middle school. We knew we didn't want to send him to our local middle school. It consistently has one of the lowest sets of test scores in the district. While I am among the first  to say that tests don't mean everything, it does mean something if the large majority of the students at a school can't achieve even basic competence on them. The school also has a lot of behavior problems and some of the students are even involved in gangs. Though it would have horrified the young, idealistic version of me who wanted to teach in an inner city school, I knew I could not put my child in that environment. He got a spot at a magnet school. It was better and he might have done okay there, but the strict dress code and strict discipline would have been stifling to him. Mr. Engineer, to my surprise, agreed with my point of view and told me to move forward with plans to homeschool him for middle school.

Homeschool as not all butterflies and roses all the time. After an initial honeymoon period in which Squirrelboy was ready to do anything I said because he was so happy not to be in public middle school we started to butt heads fairly often and there were moments when I seriously wondered if putting him in that school I had so wanted to avoid would really be any worse than the daily torture we were enduring. Things started to improve when we finally decided to have him formally evaluated for ADHD. When he was constantly distracted while sitting in a quiet house at the kitchen table with just me in the room I realized that it had been silly of me to let his teachers push off my suspicions for so many years. To the surprise of no one who knew him well, he was diagnosed with moderate ADHD, combined type. It was quite a journey finding the right medication and the right dosage for him, but, once we did, it was a revelation. I could actually read a page to him without him interrupting me every other sentence. He could read and answer questions in his history book without forgetting the question halfway through his answer. It was amazing.

Homeschool continued to get better in 7th grade when Mr. Engineer took over as math teacher. It turns out that I'm a really pathetic math teacher. The one thing that bothered me about homeschool, in fact, was other homeschoolers. I endured so many conversations about how horrible our local public schools (or just public schools in general) were. Some were from parents who had pulled their children out of school after bad experiences, but other parents had never sent their children to public school. They were just certain that no child could every possibly be decently educated in a public school. Or, at the very least, they MIGHT get an acceptable education, but they would certainly be subject to evil influences and grow up to be horrible people. This was from people from all over the religious spectrum - conservative Christians all the way to avowed Atheists.

I normally kept my mouth shut about the fact that, all the time I was happily homeschooling Squirrelboy, I was also having a great experience as a public school parent. Kittygirl started kindergarten the year Squirrelboy started middle school. Even though she's a very different child and might actually have had a good experience there, I was adamantly opposed to sending her to the elementary school that Squirrelboy attended. After all of his struggles there, the idea of sending another child left a bad taste in my mouth. Happily,  Mr. Engineer was sensitive to my feelings and didn't insist that we send her there. We gave serious consideration to a fairly new private school that was affordable and followed the same education philosophy as her preschool, which we adored. But then we got notice that she had won ah highly coveted lottery spot at the Spanish immersion elementary school.  We didn't immediately  decide to accept it, but, after reflection and (a little bit of) prayer, we decided it couldn't hurt to try kindergarten at the free school that so many people wanted their kids to get into. After all, the private school wasn't going to turn away our money if the Spanish immersion school was a bad fit for Kittygirl and we sought to enroll her there for first grade.

Kittygirl thrived, and continues to thrive, at that school. I was terrified of sending her back after she was diagnosed with T1D during presidents' day weekend of her kindergarten year, but the school stepped up and has provided great care. It's not always the same care I would provide, but she's safe and healthy and doesn't miss out on anything due to her diabetes.

If Squirrelboy had been my only child I might have eventually become one of those homeschooling parents who denigrate the public school system, but the fact is that public school has been nothing but a good experience for my second child.

That catches us up to today, when I've recently laid my homeschooling parent identity aside and Squirrelboy has started high school at another magnet school. He did not want to go back to public school. He grudgingly agreed that the small magnet school would be better than our gigantic local high school if he HAD to go back to school, but he really didn't want to go back. The monday before school started (for some odd reason our school year always starts on a Wednesday) he asked me if we could go shopping - for homeschool curriculum. I was expecting he would have a bumpy transition and his grades might be less than ideal for awhile as he got used to working for someone other than mom and dad. I expected that he would say the first day was tolerable, at best. To my great surprise, he declared the first day "great," and his school experience has remained almost entirely positive. He complains about some assignments and he says Civics class is boring, but overall he's amazingly positive about school. The school was also amazingly receptive to setting up a 504 plan for his ADHD and gave him every single accommodation I asked for.

For the moment, I have a mostly positive feeling about public school. Both kids are in schools that are good places for them, with teachers and staff who love their jobs and do their best to help the kids succeed. However, I'm no longer that idealist 20-something who thought public school was the only acceptable choice for socially conscious parents. Even the best school isn't a good fit for every kid, and, for some kids and families, homeschool or private school is simply a better choice. The American public school system is flawed, yes, but, in the right circumstances, it has a lot of things going for it.

In Which I Tell You What I Miss Most About Homeschooling (Spoiler Alert: It's Not Doing School in Pajamas)

Squirrelboy attended our local elementary school and is now in his first year of public high school, but in between those two I spent three years homeschooling. Our reasons for choosing homeschool for middle school were myriad and aren't directly related to this post, but I'm likely to cover them some other time.

There were many things I loved about homeschooling. The relaxed schedule was great. The ability to teach to my child's learning style was great. The lack of the social pressure that most middle schoolers seem to experience was great. For the record, since people ask Squirrelboy about this all the time, I always  made him change into regular clothes for school, except for an occasional previously schedule pajama day, so there's nothing to miss in that realm.What we both really miss is the way we started almost every day of homeschool: Storytime.

When I started homeschooling him I had all sorts of grand plans based on my many years of reading and posting on a homeschooling forum. One of those plans was having a daily "morning time." This time was going to include scripture reading, poetry reading, musical appreciation, and readalouds. Consistent scripture reading, to my chagrin, quickly went out the window, though we did manage to keep a short devotional reading. Poetry reading never really took off and it got moved to occasional poetry teas (more about that some other time). Musical appreciation never happened. However, reading aloud was a huge hit. I tried vainly to keep the name "morning time" for awhile despite the failure of my initial plans, but Squirrelboy insisted on calling it storytime and eventually I gave in.

We usually had two books going: one related to one of our school subjects (usually history, occasionally science) and one just for fun. We traveled through time and around the world with the books we experienced together. Because Squirrelboy has a particular fascination with the world wars, I now know more about them, from the perspectives of many countries, than almost anyone who isn't a historian of that period. I also made a concentrated effort to read books written by or at least chronically the experience of people outside of our white, Christian, middle class bubble. Through that, he has come to recognize his privilege and think about how his life would be different if he had been born into a different place, a different time, a different culture, or a different family.

Thanks to many years of after school tutoring, Squirrelboy can read well despite his dyslexia. However, reading is not and never will be a natural activity for him. His brain has to work significantly harder than mine to decode print. I always set aside a time for him to read silently, but I knew that that time was not what was going to get him to fall in love with books. Even without all the historical and cultural knowledge he gained through storytime, it would have been worth my time because it helped him fall in love with books. He already enjoyed books and being read to, but three years of daily storytime brought that love to a new level. I don't think he'll ever relax with a book in his hand the way I do, but he's discovered digital audiobooks, and one of his favorite ways to wind down is listening to a favorite audiobook. He prefers to fall asleep while listening to a book. He has practically memorized most of the Anne of Green Gables series, and is working his way through all the Agatha Christie ebooks available through our library.

The best news of all: even now that he's back in school, Squirrelboy wants to keep storytime going. We haven't been able to establish a routine so far, unfortunately, but we've squeezed in a few storytime sessions. Our current read: Fatherland by Robert Harris. At our current rate, it may be Thanksgiving before we finish this, but that's okay. I'll keep up this special time with my teen as long as he'll let me do it.