school search, part VII: our children as our best attributes

“Are you on any waiting lists?” my friend asks me when the topic of Isaac's school choices comes up.

“What waiting lists should I be on?”

“I don't know. It just seems like when people discuss schools, they're on waiting lists.”

This is how we talk about education these days.

Mike recently posted his class picture from kindergarten on Facebook to much acclaim. Mike is not one of these people who has a million Facebook friends, or, for that matter, who spends much time on Facebook. At all. So when 20 extensive comments showed up following that shot of a bunch of five- and six-year-olds in dorky plaids and collars to their elbows, it spoke of something significant.

People's comments read like a theater usher's directions: “Third from the left, bottom row, next to the pillar– is that Dawn Shields???!!”

There was discussion about the spellings of names, about the parents of the little fashionistas and which of them may or may not have served as den mothers and scout leaders. There was an ongoing volley about one of the classmates and her battle with cancer. The excitement in the banter (cancer aside) was palpable. There was a liberal use of punctuation – ellipses, dashes and question marks, perhaps followed by an entire row of exclamation points. In other words, it was a scene, man.

If Mike's little FB experience is any indication, who you hang with around the art table, the first bunch of people you wrestle with for your turn at the water fountain, create a lasting impression. No one talked about math lessons or reading circles. They talked about who they were in relation to each other. The social ins and outs. The personal hurts and triumphs.

We search for the right “academic” environment to set down our little people. We rank schools based on test scores. I suppose because it's measurable and this other stuff is messy. When did we decide we don't have the time for messy? Who's getting in the sandbox with me?

Look. We are fucked up as a people. But it wasn't always so. We used to be them – the kids – innocent, joyful. We have the power to help them. Furthermore, there is potential for them to help us.

A scruffy-faced man in slouchy, dirty jeans and a ballcap that reads “Go to the Edge” walks into the sports center pool area. He looks tired. Truth be told, he looks even a bit frightening. Except that he is flanked by two little girls, each grasping one of his rough hairy paws. They are probably around three and six. They are golden-haired with purple butterfly clips in their curls. Both wear pink bathing suits, the younger one's complete with tutu bouncing about on her tiny hips. He grins down at them and they bound away for the water. As context, these little girls change everything about the scene. They presumably share the genes of this hulking scrap heap of a man, or more to the point, he shares theirs. Somewhere inside him there is something this delicate. Something precious. There is a pink tutu. I just know it.

school search - part VI

There is a hair cutting school in my neighborhood where you can get walk-in five-dollar cuts. It's a good deal, if students with scissors don't make you too nervous and if you have some extra time (cuz these cats are trying to get it right...). I took Isaac there to get the hair off his ears and out of his eyes.

While waiting in the reception area, the young man who would be our hair dresser for the day approached and introduced himself. Before he could lead us to the hair chair, however, a woman stopped him to ask for his urgent help. The dryer her mother was sitting under was too hot and was beginning to scorch her scalp. The man turned down the heat dial and confirmed with the customer that the new temperature was good for her. Before leaving them, he addressed the daughter. “If it heats up too much again, just turn this dial to a lower number,” he said, pointing out the huge white markings on the chair's controls affixed in plain sight. “Oh,” replied the woman, as if this were new and strange technology she wouldn't dare have thought to tamper with. “Okay.”

Now, nothin for nothin people, and with all due respect for the 10 months these hair folks spend studying how to give perms and fool your friends with extensions, did that woman seriously not think it was within her own power to turn down the heat? Did she never investigate? Did the mother never consider removing her head from the assaulting burn? Are we so helpless as a species? Such obedient sheep to follow along until we are in physical danger or worse? Such rule followers as to be completely out of touch with our own instincts?

I have two major concerns about public schools and they have nothing to do with academics. The first is demonstrated above. We think that “discipline” issues are bad in schools, but consider this blog to weigh in on the problem of obedience, the lost art of free thinking.

So, Isaac gets his booster seat and settles in for an hour-long cut. (Don't try this at home folks!) The poor thing was having to pull out every little bit of hard-earned Montessori concentration to sit there in the chair. I wasn't any less fidgety since I was pretty certain I was going to die of bad pop music while there and kept swiveling this way and that hoping to find the radio switch to smash.

Of course, we did have plenty of time for conversation, the young man and I at least, since Isaac was refusing to speak. During that time I made sure to point out to my son his hair dresser's Barbie pink fingernails.

Isaac has been very influenced by a couple friends, who don't even live in the area anymore, but whose rigid ideas of gender they managed to pass on quite successfully on some level to my son.

(“I'm not going to have an earring when I grow up. I'm going to be a real boy!” he once said to me. Images of Pinocchio in a sterling earcuff float through my mind. WTF??)

I learned that hair dresser guy, had a Halloween party for his birthday every year, since it fell at the end of October and that this year he was going to be a pirate. I also learned that he was graduating next month. And finally, I learned that he was born and raised in Salinas, which caused me to have to stop myself from grabbing his arm, the one with the black rubber bracelet that said “Vanity,” and blurting out, “Oh my god! That must have been terrible for you!” Salinas, California, known as it is for its associations with Steinbeck, big agriculture, and gang violence, isn't quite as note-worthy in its general ideas of tolerance.

Which brings me to problem number two in the public schools: a lack of emphasis on compassionate social interaction and integration.

I mean, let's face it people. We are at war. What do we have to teach our kids about empathy or cooperation? Gee, can't imagine why bullying is a problem...

I'm planning on going as my worst nightmare for Halloween this year: a soccer mom. “Are you gonna scream a lot?” my friend asked me, “Because you need to scream a lot.” (Capri Sun, anyone? Pictures to follow.) While I went searching for a blonde bob wig in the drug store the other day to round out my costume, my gentle, loving son battled an invisible victim with a bloody plastic hatchet, behavior I find all the more disturbing since the kid's only ever watched a few hours of television in his life and most of that consisted of Dinosaur Train and the Olympics. You might find it odd that I connect fumbling foreign policies, youth sports teams, dumby weaponry and the absence of kindness, and if so, then, I still have more convincing to do. Later. Just how I like to think about where to send Isaac to school next year. Later.

school search part IV

There is a school where Isaac goes every night while we sleep. He does his best not to wake us, then gets on his dad's bike and rides 50 miles to Big Sur where he meets his friends and Secret School commences.

It's been about five months, I'd say, that we've been hearing about Secret School. There are special keys involved – usually bits of plastic we find around that have no known origin. “That's my key to Secret School!” Isaac will shriek, and dive for it before it his the trashcan.

By all accounts Secret School is a very special place. Very fun. And, of course, very secret. He can't really tell us all the things that go on there. We wouldn't understand anyway.

His preschool teacher has a theory on Secret School. You see, there are five of them – the Fab Five I call them – who've been together now since, well, yes, since they were in diapers. Isaac, two other little boys his age, and a pair of sisters. Theses days, they are the cool cats. The older group at school. Inseparable. We take them to the park and they slide down the slides holding hands. (Yes, I forgot my camera, thank you very much.) And now it seems the group is breaking up. The sisters are moving. The other boys are going to a different kindergarten experience next year while Isaac will stay where he is.

This week is the last for most of them to be all together. Really, it's nothing short of heartbreaking. They've known it was coming, and Isaac's teacher believes that Secret School is their way of staying together. No matter where they live or where they go to school by day, by night they run the show, hanging out among the redwoods, learning only the fun stuff, no grown up rules, nobody has to leave.

Sometimes in the mornings, Isaac will ask us, “Did you hear me 'neak out for Secret School??” Or he might report on who wasn't able to be at Secret School, or even a guest speaker that showed up at Secret School. This morning the story was a new one.

“I didn't go to regular Secret School last night,” he told us.

“Oh, really?”

“Everybody else, they went to the usual Secret School, but I went to a different Secret School. Just to check it out.”

“To check it out, huh?”

“Yeah, you know, see what it was like.”

“And how was it?”

“Good. A lot of the things were the same.”

“There were different kids there though?”

“Yeah. One kid talked like a pirate. You know, 'Get the booty!' Stuff like that.”

“Hmm. So you think you're gonna go to this new Secret School?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

school search, part III

Losing it. We are. Losing it.

After re-reviewing another alternative education website, focusing in on one school I know we've read about 1000 times before, and (again) searching for life and houses in its general vicinity and proximity to oceans and airports, Mike and I are still beside each other with the laptop, me zoning out, Mike at the keyboard when I shake myself from my reverie just in time to catch this phrase being typed in the Google search box: “Best elementary school in the world,” then he hits enter.

Since you asked, I'll tell you that what appears when you lose it and start typing this bizarre thing into Google is a school in Laguna Beach, California called “Top of the World Elementary.” And since you further inquired, “It is among the few public elementary schools in California to receive a distinguished GreatSchools Rating of 9 out of 10.” (Zzzzzz. Oh, sorry, I thought we were talking about the future of children. I must have wandered into the wrong meeting.).

There is also (since you insist on hearing more) an article that debates whether Finland has perhaps the top educational system around, though I don't suspect we'll move there since it can tend to be very cold and very dark and good as they might be at schooling, there are people there who eat reindeer, and I REFUSE to explain THAT ONE to the boy who talks non-stop about the magic of Santa Claus 12 months out of the year.

And (you just won't let this die, will you?) there is a link to a page for an out of print book on some of the best schools in the world as determined by a couple folks in New Zealand.

Hard to tell if it was exhaustion or clarity that kept Mike plugging away, and so he typed in “compassionate elementary” which headed us for an elementary school in Fort Collins, Colorado which boasts a Kindness and Compassion Club and a school in Saco, Maine that has completed a 7 month kindness initiative through something called the Kindness Center.

The search is still on. Maybe something we found today will be the ticket (just not the Rudolph murderers). It's hard not knowing. It's hard looking at your family's future in the form of small pins plugged into an electronic map denoting real estate for sale and then measuring how far each pin is from the school you just got a virtual glimpse of. And how far the school is from the town, when there is one. Mapping, mapping. Studying. Looking for the right key words that will unlock it all.

school search, part II

school search, part I

I take in the scene and mumble under my breath. “Well, look at us now.”

We are standing in the middle of a 14-acres campus. There is an arch from nowhere to nowhere, bedecked with vines and sunflowers – all of them real and grown on the property. Plastic bottles have been cut into flowers and strung above the field. The play structures are adorned with colored ribbons; there is a maypole in the center, it's extended streamers of red, gold and green braided at the ends and awaiting small hands to dance with them around and around. People stand at tables making wreaths of cut flowers, selling all-natural popsicles for four tickets each. Most of them are wearing flowing, layered clothing and strappy sandals or no shoes at all. They give off a feeling vaguely reminiscent of a Renaissance Faire, only this is their everyday attire. Here and there a hand-painted sign is tacked up that reads something like “Kindness” or “Equality.”

Have we cracked up completely? If US Airways didn't still owe us to the tune of another $800, I swear I'd race to the nearest airport and fly east until I was safely over territory in which the people drop their r's from the ends of words adding them inexplicably to the ends of other words, where any idiot knows what it means to order a coffee - regulah - where sarcasm and snarky humor would take this scene, chew it up, and spit it out right along with their Coke: through the nose. I would para-freaking-chute down into that world, the one that's perfected the “Don't even think of talking to me” look and walk and forget this every happened.

Are we seriously considering sending our son to this freak hippie school?

Meanwhile, Isaac, notoriously reticent in new environments, skips ahead of us, watching uninhibited while eight-year-olds make enormous bubbles; the child even speaks to one of the teachers of his own volition. There are goats; there are trees to climb; he wants to surf the see-saw again.

It's pretty much on my list of goals in life: up there with my vow never to rent a bounce house for my son's birthday and to release all bowel movements into a functioning toilet. Though before today I gave it only peripheral attention, my list of goals includes never to be associated with any event or organization at which a maypole dance is danced around an actual maypole.

They've worn me down. It's been almost 13 years. Thirteen years out of 40. I'm no math genius, but that's more than a quarter of my life, over fifty percent of my adult years, living in California.

I think about getting Isaac registered here just for the endless writing fodder it'd provide me. I'd be a spy for the other side. But what is the other side? I thought that motherhood was the dawn of my identity crisis, but silly me, it'd happened years before that, when my life officially began as someone forever more bicoastal.

Someone hands me a petition for farmers to be able to grow hemp. I am light-headed from the smell of redwood; I am starting to cozy up to the idea of a patchwork prairie skirt, or growing my hair to my waist. They are dancing the maypole now, the colors are spinning. This must be how they do it. I thought it was hemp, but maybe I just signed my soul over to their cult. People are singing; Isaac wants to see the turtles again; the crystals are so shiny in the sun...