The teen is graduating from high school next week.
I am blown away by this fact.
I don't know if it's possible to raise children without feeling guilty, or at least utterly convinced that you destroyed them at some point, but I was sure, concretely, that this kid was going to end up dead someplace and it would be all my fault. After all, I divorced her dad when she was a preschooler, uprooted her world again at 7 by moving her 1500 miles, brought a troubled teen into the house, sent her to a school with crazy teachers (was it 4th grade she didn't finish, or 5th? I pulled her out of school with two weeks left to go when a teacher called her "evil"), another school, later, with more crazy teachers--it really wasn't until 8th grade that things calmed down and she made some real friends. She's 17, and she's lived in six separate domiciles. She suffered academically because of this, and by the beginning of her junior year, it looked as though she really was going to drop out.
And I'm her mom: of course I blamed myself. If I had been older, waited until I had an established career before having kids, had her think of one house, one town, even, as her own, if, if, if....
I think this is a pretty human response to raising children, especially if a kid has problems. It took some time for us to get to what her real issues were, and as it happened, they had nothing to do with things I'd done: all I needed to do was support her. Once we figured that out, it was all good.
The other thing we did that made a huge difference was transferring her to an alternative school halfway through her junior year. She went from a school of about 2000 kids to a school of 40. She went from a traditional program, with homework and enrichment and all that stuff to one of shorter schooldays, longer class periods, and a hands-on, discussion-based grading model. I can't tell you the difference it made. Well, yes I can. She's gone from flunking out to graduating early. She lost some things she liked--the wider variety of art classes at her other school, marching band--but what she gained was incalculably greater.
For many young people, the current centralized megaschool model just doesn't seem to work very well. I'm really glad we go out of it, and I'm totally proud of my kid for succeeding.
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3 comments:
NYMary--Congratulations!
Thank you for that post. Each story of success from people I respect who share my values reassures me that we will also succeed.
Our family is just at the edge of the public school cliff with my oldest in second grade. She is a very intelligent, curious 7yo, and I'm sure if she got even the slightest bit of encouragement from her teacher, she would love school. But so far she's gotten teachers who aren't capable of reaching her. I met with the principle before the holiday break about trying to switch her to the other class for the remainder of the year. And though the principle admitted that her teacher is the wrong one for her this year AND the one they gave her last year was also wrong, they're not gonna switch her. Instead, we're forming some sort of team to make this year bearable.
The word disorder is just starting to peek out, intimated by the school, named by a zealous graduate student family friend, avoided by me.
Oops.
Principal, 'cause she's my pal, right?
Small class sizes do help kids from getting lost in the shuffle.
The local elementary school has class sizes of 20. Hope it stays that way.
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