Soapbox

So I’ve got this kid… and after an entire summer of dreading it, I finally put him on the bus and sent him off to kindergarten. They always tell you that it’s harder on the parents than on the child, but I’m here to tell you that it isn’t necessarily true.

He’d done fine in preschool, so I figured kindergarten wouldn’t be a big hurdle, but I was wrong.
The first day parents got to stay for an hour, and then come back at the end of the day. I found that my boy, who’d been smiling so sweetly in his new school clothes when I left, was in tears when I returned. The teachers had taken away his bag of school supplies that he’d so proudly chosen a few days before, and put them in a bin on a shelf. They told him that they were still his, and he could use them every day at school, but he hadn’t realized that he wasn’t going to get to take them home again, and was devastated that they wouldn’t give them back.

I was amazed. Don’t these people have any kids of their own? I just looked at the teacher for a second- is this really hard for you to figure out? I got the bin off the shelf and gave the crayons and goofy scissors back to him. "Stephen, tonight we’ll go to the store and buy some ‘staying at school’ supplies," I told him " and those things must stay here in your bin at school, OK?" Instant smiles.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that if the kid is crying because you took his crayons-well, for God’s sake woman- he’s barely 5! Give him back the dumb crayons!

I thought things would look up after that, but the next day went even worse. (The teacher finally told me about it a month or so later.) Apparently, about 20 minutes into the day, Stephen started to cry. He apologized and said that he didn’t exactly know why he was sad, he just was. So the teacher took him aside and sat with her arm around him while her assistant took over the class. Stephen continued to sob quietly, then lifted his head and said, "Oh this is silly, really. I’m going to give myself such a headache if I don’t stop." He tried to get himself together, but a minute or two later, the crying began again.

At one point he lifted his head again and wailed, "Oh what must you think of me, crying like this!" The teacher said that she managed to keep from laughing outright and told him that she just thought that he was sad, but the next day he would feel much better at school. He eventually got over whatever was breaking his heart and when he got home that afternoon he was quite calm. He simply informed me soberly that he had "troubles" at school, and that it would be best if he didn’t go any more. Hey- he gave it a try: it didn’t work out.
We managed to convince him that if he took a special ‘friend’ along in his backpack, (he chose a purple plastic armadillo) and thought of his friend being right there with him at school, the troubles wouldn’t seem so bad. And then, like unhappy moms must do the world over, I made him get back on the bus the next day.
The frustrating thing is that for a child as smart as this one (he can read "Charlotte’s Web" and knows all 50 states and their capitols) school should be as easy as falling off a log, shouldn’t it? Well, learning is easy for Stephen: nothing else is.

Sometimes it stinks to have your kids growing up; meeting the world head-on! It was much easier when he was a baby and my biggest concern was if his diaper would leak on me in the middle of Krogers.
Maybe homeschooling isn’t quite as crazy as it sounds…