TSS. What hurts the most...

That's The Susquehanna School, not Toxic Shock Syndrome.

Just found out that the building of our beloved, erstwhile school (blog post about it here) was recently sold. At a bargain basement price, of course, so as predicted parents like me who prepaid thousands of dollars of tuition are &#*+ out of luck. Not that I ever expected to see a red cent. Still, now that it's official, it does not feel good. But that's not what hurts the most.

To add insult to injury... When the school closed one month into the 2007 school year, in a very sudden and dramatic and awful way, leaving students and teachers completely high and dry, some of us were going to try to start a new school; we asked if we could take some of the books and supplies with us. We were told by the Board that we were not to remove ANYTHING from the building--not one crayon--because the contents were part of the school's assets and would be auctioned off to help pay its debts once the school was sold. It felt like a cruel proclamation at the time; we already felt so screwed over by the Board (who by then we figured out had blatantly lied to us about the state of things at a meeting only a few weeks before, and also had encouraged us to pay our tuition in advance for the year--they were not trying to defraud us, but we were furious at all the secrets and lies).

It seemed like the least they could do was to let us have part of what we were owed in the form of supplies that could have been tremendously useful to us as we embarked on starting a new school that we hoped would rise from the ashes of this complete and utter disaster. Nonetheless, as we tried to forge ahead through all the shock and devastation, we tried to look forward to the day the things would be auctioned off, figuring we'd probably bid on at least some of the things that we could use for our awesome new school that we were going to build. Well, if you've read my blog or if you know me, you know that the new school thing didn't really work out, but that's (sort of) another story. What is kind of burning me up right now is that I just heard that the new owners of the building didn't want any of the stuff in there and it was all going to be hauled off to the land fill. WHAT??

Granted, I am not involved in any school now, so a lot of the things inside the school (chairs, tables, chalk boards) are no longer of any interest to me, though of course as a homeschooler there are plenty of things in there that I could put to great use (globes, books, supplies, etc.). But in any case, wow, it's the principle of the thing.

You'd think (at least, I'd think) I'd be done being hurt by the undoing of that school--so very many principles were grossly violated, in my view; what's one more? And yet, it does hurt. UGH.

Fortunately, some of the stuff was salvaged by a parent who rented a van and hauled off whatever she could to her garage. She has invited former TSS parents to come help themselves to it next weekend. I'm grateful to her (and her husband, who was actually on the dastardly board but was a brand new member and did not seem to have had anything to do with the shenanigans). But boy, has it stirred up hurt and anger in me that I thought I had let go of already. I guess letting go is a process, and I should know that, and shouldn't be surprised.

But honestly, when you get down to it, while it's partly about the money I'll never get, and it's partly about the possessions of the school that might have been of some value to unpaid creditors (parents; me), it's probably more that I'm just still mourning the loss of a school I loved so much, of a school that finally felt like home for my son. And it does still burn me up when I think that there were so very many mistakes made along the way that led to that loss. Of course we can never know if the school could have been saved had things been handled differently. But it can still torment me a bit to ponder it.

So, I'm taking deep breaths. I'm reminding myself how well the homeschooling is going, how much I love getting to spend so much time with my amazing, kind, loving, funny, brilliant child. How I'm becoming more and more at home in the homeschool community, building friendships that are beginning to be quite important to me. How some of the homeschool activities (I'm thinking in particular of the Shakespeare class last spring, but there have been other things as well) have been extraordinary, definitely as good as anything he would have done at TSS. How I'm really quite happy with my life and hardly ever look back, even though balancing everything can be crazy hard sometimes. But when something like this comes up, it feels like it's all right there again, slamming right into me head on. The anger and the hurt are right back. All the hopes... the incredible relief I felt to have found this place for George that fit him like a glove... Ok, deep breaths. Homeschooling is also fitting him like a glove, and he's thriving. He truly is. And that's what it really has to come down to.

Deep breaths. Letting go. Again.

Not a bad problem...

But still a bit of a problem. Or at least a minor dilemma.

You see, George has gotten so efficient at doing his work that yesterday he was done by about 9:30 (he's definitely a morning person). Our deal has been that when he completes all his work for the day, he can play computer or DS games pretty much until his heart's content.

In the past, a very good day would mean he'd be done by about noon, but usually it was more like 1:30 or even later. It used to be that when he first woke up he liked to read and/or play in his room before getting started on his work. This was fine by me. I have never had to make reading part of his work in a formal way, as I'm sure I've mentioned, as he does it very often and very willingly anyway. All kinds of books, on all kinds of topics. And playing in his room with his toys for a couple of hours or so is, I think, a perfectly fine use of his time. He has some really nice toys and he always plays with them in such imaginative ways. I do think that that sort of activity can be not merely fun but also an important and constructive part of growing up.

So, he'd read and/or play for awhile, then do some work, then maybe read some more, or perhaps ask to watch a documentary (usually history or science), then get some more work done, and, well, you get the idea. He's been very good about getting all of his work done pretty much every day, and most days has ended up with 1-2 hours of time to play on his DS or the computer, which I think is reasonable. Every afternoon at what would be more or less the end of a traditional school day, either he has Tae Kwon Do or he plays with his friends in the neighborhood, so there has always been a sort of natural end to his electronic game time. (I don't let him play them after dinner--too much stimulation too close to bedtime.) It's all been going perfectly smoothly.

Until now, when it seems to be going too smoothly! He has figured out that if he starts working from the second he wakes up, and doesn't take a break, he can be on his DS before I've even made breakfast. Somehow, that just doesn't seem quite right to me.

It's not that he doesn't have enough work to do; he does. My husband, who teaches 4th grade, was a little surprised that George is able to get everything done so quickly, and was wondering if his load was too light. But I asked him to imagine that he had only one student, and it was his best one, and he had two hours to teach her everything he would normally cover in the course of a day--did he think he could? For sure. There is so much time spent in a day on explaining things more at length to the students who don't pick it up right away, and then doing lots of practice to make sure they really have it, to say nothing of recess and lunch and time spent going to a different classroom for music or library or whatever.... When you do away with all of that, it's not so hard to see how a full day's worth of work could, especially for someone who is super bright and right on task, be accomplished in a couple of hours or so.

So, what to do? I don't really think it's fair to create more work for him (well, maybe I could add just a teeny bit...). He knows what it is that he's supposed to be doing, and giving him more work would be like punishing him for being efficient, and I don't think that's a good approach. Besides, when I think about what to make him do--should I make him do twice the chores? Should I make him do two online math sessions a day instead of one? (He started back up with math again; yay! It did take a very gentle push from me, but he did say that he was actually starting to miss it. But maybe that's a topic for another post!) Should I make him write more? All of these things seem kind of punitive to me, and I think they would to him, too. I certainly don't want him to get discouraged and then slack off. He is working hard and learning plenty, so that's not really the problem. I guess the problem is just too much DS/computer game time.

So maybe I just need to set limits on that. I preferred the natural limits imposed by his daily work on one end and his afternoon schedule on the other, but if that's not going to work anymore I guess I will just need to come up with some sort of system/limit that I'm comfortable with and that he doesn't find too discouraging. Because, again, I like that the game-time is such a strong motivator for him to get his work done. I may have to remind him to practice his recorder or to clean the cat box, but I never have to hound him or argue with him about it. And while he actually enjoys most of his learning activities (the chores, not so much!), I know that at least part of what gets him going on all of these things is that he knows they're what's standing between him and his games. I think it's kind of a delicate balance and it's working fantastically well, really. I don't want to blow it. But neither do I want my son on a computer game for five hours straight.

As problems go, it's a pretty good one to have, I guess! Suggestions would be most welcome...

Letting Go

This Friday is the retrial for the dissolution of the amazing alternative school that George attended for several glorious months during the last half of first grade and the very beginning of second grade, before the school went under in September of 2007—in a rather spectacularly destructive way—due to financial mismanagement and incompetence. The school's going under was totally devastating for many people, not the least of whom George, and myself. In some ways, we have been trying to regain our balance ever since. Let me explain.

It would be an understatement to say that George has had a difficult time at school since, well, preschool. He has been quite unhappy in most of the classrooms/schools he's been a part of; a discussion of why would take too long but the most major factor is that he’s really, really advanced intellectually, and craves intellectual stimulation, and most of his teachers just didn’t know what to do with him. He loves learning and loves a challenge, and gets very discouraged and acts out in various ways when he’s not being engaged or challenged in school. First grade was truly miserable—he was forced to sit still (“criss-cross applesause” or cross-legged on the floor) for 90-minute blocks while the teacher went over the letter sounds, day in and day out. He was already reading Harry Potter and the New York Times at that point, but the teacher insisted that the fact that he knew how to read didn’t mean that he understood the mechanics of the letter sounds (actually, he truly did understand). The more she insisted he sit through these excruciatingly easy and boring lessons, the more unhappy (and uncooperative) he became. I did everything I could do to work with the teacher and the school to try to find a workable solution, all for naught. If you know me you’ve probably heard the story more than once; if not, you can fill in the blanks. It was abysmal. George was crying and begging me on an almost daily basis not to make him go to school, and had even slipped into a sort of depression.

That’s when I finally listened to some friends of mine who had been telling me how great their daughter’s alternative school was. I must be honest, I didn’t like the sound of “alternative school”. (Don’t ask me why, when I was hating his traditional school at that point.) I thought it sounded lightweight, and all hippy-dippy, like a bunch of kids sitting around making daisy chains or doing whatever they wanted. I wanted rigorous academics. I wanted structure! How else would my kid learn anything? But I was desperate. I figured I might as well at least go visit the school. Was I in for a surprise.

When I got there, in the mid-morning, the director didn’t seem to have much to say—she wanted me to go observe the (multi-age, early elementary) class in action, which she said would speak for itself. When I walked in, they were transitioning from one activity to another, and the teacher had them do a short series of sort of yoga exercises to stretch but also to help them reorient themselves and be ready to focus on the new activity. I was intrigued, to say the least.

Next she had them sit in a circle. They could sit in any position they liked; it didn’t have to be “criss-cross applesauce”—they just had to sit, as she explained, in a way that didn’t block anyone’s view of the center of the circle. It made perfect sense—order was requested, and indeed required, but not for some arbitrary, unarticulated reason. It was so that everyone could participate fully. I was liking this more and more with each passing minute.

Next she put the materials for their new science project in the middle of the circle, and asked them to try to figure out what their next experiment was going to be, and how the materials were going to be used for it. They were really having fun with this, coming up with some interesting guesses and building on each other’s ideas. When they ultimately figured it out, she then asked them to try to guess how the experiment would turn out. After several kids had offered their thoughts, one very precocious girl raised her hand and said, “Why don’t you just tell us what’s going to happen?” I was really wondering how the teacher would respond to that one! I thought she might even get flustered. I was thinking about how much George’s teachers seemed to dislike it when he asked them why they were making him do a particular activity. Ha, did I have a lot to learn—about alternative education in general and this teacher in particular. She actually welcomed the question, and was genuinely glad that the student had asked. Her answer was that she wanted them to learn to think like scientists, and that this is exactly what scientists do—they come up with experiments and then they hypothesize about the results before they carry them out. Brilliant!

The discussion continued for a while longer, until everyone had had his/her say; then the teacher told them to get their writing notebooks, find a seat somewhere, and write down their hypotheses and expectations. Since it was a multi-age and multi-ability room, some kids were able to write a paragraph, while others could really only draw pictures. She went around the room while they were working on this and helped each child individually; the ones who were writing a paragraph got instruction/help on punctuation and sentence structure, while those who were just learning to write got help sounding out and writing down a word or two. Anyone who needed it also got suggestions about handwriting, etc. She also wrote on the board some key concepts relating to the experiment, and made sure everyone knew what they meant. This whole thing was a revelation to me. No handwriting worksheets. No copying down random sentences off the board. No fill-in-the-blanks. No seating charts. And yet, boy, were the kids learning! They were learning scientific concepts, scientific thinking, writing, penmanship… each at his or her own level. They were also learning how to work both together and independently, and were required to be respectful of their classmates and teacher, but weren’t expected to follow any arbitrary or senseless rules. It hit me how much closer this educational approach was to my parenting. I could imagine George really thriving in this environment. At that point, there was pretty much no turning back for me! I brought George in for the afternoon and he loved it as much as I’d hoped and figured he would. He never went back to his public school (except briefly to say goodbye and get his things).

Fast forward to the following September. Two weeks into the school year, a letter went home with the kids, informing us that the school was out of money and was going to have to shut down at the end of the month. WHAT?? We knew the school was in some trouble but the Board had obviously lied to us regarding the extent of the woes. We had been assured explicitly and repeatedly that the school had enough money to stay open for at least one or two years, and that all sorts of things were being done to ensure that it would be around for the duration. We had been asked to pay our tuition for at least half the year in advance, which we did. But the $5500 or so that we lost was nothing compared to the utter devastation we felt at the loss of the school we loved so dearly. (Don’t get me wrong—I could absolutely use that $$ now.)

At that point, when the school closed, I felt like we were thrust into limbo. When I told George the school was closing he burst into tears and begged me not to send him back to public school. The only other private schools in the area are religious, and have a very traditional approach to education; as such they didn't seem like a good fit for him. I didn’t think homeschooling was really an option for us at that point. So we set about doing the logical thing(?), and tried to start a new alternative school. That is a very long story and this story is already getting long enough… let me just say that we ultimately ended up with a Montessori school—which George too quickly outgrew. It's been a real roller coaster ride, and has been exhausting in so many ways. Now here we are, homeschooling. Mostly I love it (though it would be a lot easier if I didn’t also have to work), but I still mourn the loss of that school. I guess I can’t quite explain why it meant so much to me and how much its going under still upsets me if I think about it.

Anyway, they are having a hearing to decide something about the assets of the school—the building hasn’t sold, so the debts have continued to accrue. If the building does ever sell, once the mortgage and the lawyers are all paid off it’s highly doubtful that there will be any money left to reimburse parents who prepaid tuition. This hearing was to have taken place last month but due to some technicality it was postponed until this Friday. I went to the courthouse for it last month, hoping to get some sort of closure (if not at least a small percentage of what is owed to me). But I got no sense of closure—and I don’t think it was because of the postponement. I don’t know if I’ll ever really get a sense of closure on this.

What do I want for closure? I want my $5500 back, yes, though I know I won’t get it. More than that, I want somehow to erase the anguish and heartbreak we went through when we found out the one school that was really right for George was closing in two weeks, and that he wouldn’t even be able to have one full year there (let alone a whole scholastic career). I want to have back the tremendous amount of time and energy I expended working to set up a new school that would take that one’s place. Well, actually, what I really want is to have that amazing school back, but that's clearly not happening.

So, I don’t think I’ll go to the courthouse this Friday. I’ll be busy anyway, as George is in a homeschool production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that’s being performed at a local Faerie Festival. A truly wonderful experience that he never would have had were that school still in existence. There are many, many things I love about homeschooling, and now that I’m really done with trying to set up schools in the area I am finally beginning to find my rhythm with it. I’d like to think that I can educate my son as well as that school could have, but honestly, I can’t say that I’m certain I can. I’m sure as hell going to keep trying, though.