Kindergarden Fears

My boy will turn five in April.  Its a milestone birthday because it means that in the fall he will be able to start kindergarden.  He's excited to start school.  He has been for as long as I can remember.  On his third birthday he asked, "Do I get to go to school now?"  Almost every day since then he has asked the same question.  My Caleb loves the idea of school.  He craves knowledge and information.  His love for all things educational scares me sometimes.  This kid will choose a book over a toy any day of the week.  He has no fear of school.  No doubt that he will have friends and be liked and that the teacher will care for him and teach him.

Me?  I have insane amounts of fear and anxiety regarding my precious boy going to school.  I'm a teacher.  I've worked in many different schools in many different settings.  I taught in inner city Chicago schools.  I taught in a Minneapolis charter school.  I taught in Minneapolis public schools.  I taught in Anoka Hennepin Schools.  I know schools.  I know how they work.  I've seen them be amazing and I have seen them suck the love of learning and passionate innocence from children.

As a high school and middle school Reading Specialist, I work with students who, for various reasons which I will not go into here, struggle with reading and therefore, struggle academically.  The vast majority of those students have no love for school or academics or anything remotely connected to the current educational system.  Because my students generally have such a distain for education and think they can't do school, I have to take a lot of time in the beginning of my class to bring back those innocent, inquisitive, joyful, trusting feelings towards the classroom.  Part of what I do is to talk with students about what their data shows me.  Very few of the students I work with have learning disabilities.  They didn't start out behind.  On the contrary, most of them performed at or above grade level in the early years of school.  Then, at some point, for some reason, they fell behind.  Sometimes it was family circumstances-a divorce, a move, a death, a birth, etc.  Other times it was a negative experience with a teacher.  Sometimes its an experience with classmates or some aspect of the educational system.  This is what scares me.

My son has a genuine love for learning.  He is teaching himself to read-for real.  On his own he is sounding out words, trying to spell, etc.  95% of his time at home, he is immersed in a stack of books looking at the letters, trying to figure out how they form words.  He has put some words together and read titles and words.  He is obsessed with numbers.  Last summer, when he had just turned four, the kid was doing mental math-addition and subtraction.  In his head.  On his own.  Yesterday he was playing with puzzles at my parents' house and he came up to me and said, "Mama, does six plus six equal twelve?"  "Um...yeah..." I said, a bit taken aback, "where did you see that?"  "No where."  So I went into the playroom to see what he was doing.  I assumed he was doing a number puzzle or looking at a book with numbers and equations in it.  Nope, he was just doing a normal puzzle.  He had taken the pieces out of the puzzle and sorted them into two groups of six pieces each.  On his own, he saw that a group of puzzle pieces could be divided into groups and then added together to make a whole.  His little brain is always thinking and making connections.  He is a sponge.

On the iPad he frequently watches all kinds of shows about building, animals, etc.  The other day he came up to me talking about how a sloth hangs upside down and moves really slowly and there are little creatures that live on the sloth too...he tells me about the digestive system...he tells me about microscopic sea creatures...he asks questions all the time...I'm afraid that he will be one of those kids whose sweet, innocent, inquisitive, joyful interest in the world around him will be squashed by the pressures of the system.  

Thankfully, I am a part of the system. I know how it works.  I know what red flags to watch for.  I know what happens in a classroom.  I know the educational lingo.  I can advocate for and support my boy through the jungle that is public education.  I have the experience, expertise and confidence to ask questions.  To watch and listen to my son.  To be vigilant about his experiences and education.  To keep him from getting lost in the system.  But what about the kids who don't have any sort of advocate?  What about the kids who do fall through the cracks of the system?  Its sad to me, that as a a professional educator, I am scared to send my own child to school.  I'm scared about what the system might do to him.