Maybe this year, I'll make the Parent Honor Roll

I’ve decided this is my favorite time of year.

And the reason is simple, though perhaps somewhat pathetic:  we’re three weeks into school and I haven’t messed anything up yet.

Sometimes by the time school gets out in June, I feel like I’m looking back on a ladder of errors and missteps. Arriving late to a parent-teacher conference. Making mistakes on the library volunteer schedule that I’m responsible for organizing every week. Neglecting to refill the kids’ lunch accounts. Overlooking my room-parent duty to supply popsicles for Field Day.

The kids seem to make far fewer mistakes than I do in the course of a school year. But their responsibilities also fall into a narrower scope: get to the bus on time and get homework done. There isn’t a lot of room for error.

I take solace in reminding myself that school isn’t my job, and I make far fewer mistakes at the work for which I’m paid than the unpaid work of overseeing the kids’ schedules and events and my own school-related volunteer commitments. And it also helps to know I’m not the only adult making mistakes. Last year it was the day before Field Day when I suddenly remembered that supplying popsicles was my responsibility. “I would have been the first room parent in the history of the Carlisle Public Schools to forget popsicles on Field Day,” I said to Holly’s homeroom teacher. “Actually, the entire sixth grade teaching team forgot about Popsicles this year. We were relieved that you thought of it at all,” she confessed, making me feel a little better.

But it’s only the third full week of school. We’ve only just begun. No one yet has missed the bus on my watch or left for school without the proper early-dismissal note. So far we have a perfect batting average.

It won’t last, but it’s a good feeling while it does. The kids are always diligent about homework and routines; I’m the one who gets frazzled as the year goes on and makes out the check for intermural sports incorrectly or gets lost on Parents’ Night. So far so good. In another month, I’ll have mistakes to report, but at the moment, I’m passing both seventh grade and tenth grade as a parent.

Maybe this year I’ll even make the Parental Honor Roll, which I’m convinced exists in some secret place and lists all the parents who do everything right.

Or if not this year, maybe next.

Last day of school

I haven’t made presents for the kids’ teachers or picked up a gift card for the bus driver. Our month hasn’t included a single classroom visit for student poetry readings or choral presentations. No one has handed me a paper bag overflowing with art projects to somehow find room for around the house or in the basement.

So in some ways, it doesn’t quite feel like the last day of school. All those rituals of the earlier years seem to have tapered off. The kids have written their own end-of-year thankyou notes to their teachers without much prompting from me, and other parents have assured me that bus driver gifts are not typical in high school. Holly has described to me a couple of her final projects, and Tim is studying hard for exams, so I’ll just have to trust them that these are the end-of-year rituals that mark middle school and high school.

Despite the relative lack of fanfare, it’s good to see the school year drawing to a close, not because it wasn’t a fine year for all of us but because I can’t help feeling a twinge of victory at having pulled it off.

As this year began, I had so many apprehensions. High school was a whole new world to us, and I fretted over everything from how Tim would ever get to the bus stop for the pre-dawn, 6:40 a.m. pick-up to how I would learn to navigate the online parental communication system that offers parents information on grades, absences, and all other critical details of which we should be keeping track.

And even though middle school felt like a known quantity for us, I knew it would be different for Holly than for Tim, and wondered whether she would continue having secure friendships and keep up reliably with her homework.

But somehow it all worked out. Tim proved himself able to wake up at 5:30 a.m., shower, and make his own breakfast in order to be ready for a ride to the bus stop by 6:30. He interacted with new teachers whom I didn’t know and met kids different from those he’d gone to school with since kindergarten. He joined the freshman football team, made a few new friends, and earned High Academic Honors for the year. Holly wrote short stories, executed science projects, researched Afghanistan, helped to organize a fundraiser, and even joined the Ultimate Frisbee team.

I’m grateful that it was a safe and happy school year, given that school years have the potential to be neither safe nor happy. Yet I’m not sorry to see it ending, especially as the snow days last winter gave us plenty of extra time to enjoy the school year as it drew out through the end of June. Even though my own vacation from work doesn’t come until well into August, I’ll get plenty of enjoyment out of the kids’ time off from school. No bag lunches to prepare; no paperwork to fill out for their field trips and activities; and best of all, no more pre-5 a.m. wake-ups for me until September.

When I was my kids’ age, I loved the feeling of leaving school at the end of the year. I never imagined it could be nearly as fun for an adult to see the school year end. And maybe it’s not quite the same. But it’s pretty good. Even if I won’t have the long lazy summer days of reading or hanging out with friends that my kids can now choose to enjoy, I’ll still benefit from the change of pace. And from the contented recollections of a great school year gone by.

Next stop: Graduation

This coming week I'll help finish the preparations for my son Tim’s eighth grade graduation. I'm one of three event co-chairs, which seems fittingly symbolic: I'm executing tangible tasks -- overseeing programs and flowers, scheduling the graduation dance, renting the folding chairs -- to symbolize the end of his nine years at our local school.

Sometimes I think I've changed more than he has in these nine years. I was so starry-eyed as we registered for kindergarten. This is one of the most desirable school systems in the country; I felt so lucky to be able to live here and send my child here, and I was sure everything would be perfect. He'd have perfect teachers, make perfect friends, do all the right activities: soccer, band, middle school dances, Student Council. This was, after all, the same school I attended myself for grades kindergarten through eight, and almost all my memories of it were happy ones. 

But of course, public school isn't Disney World, no matter how highly rated the school system. Parents spar with the administration and gripe among themselves about teachers. Even the most exclusive suburbs, with parents who lavish every possible benefit on their children, produce kids who are occasionally unkind. And it turned out my kid didn't like soccer. Or band. Or Student Council. The middle school dances were fine -- until he went through his first break-up and didn’t want to go anymore for a while. That was one milestone I most definitely was not anticipating back at kindergarten orientation.

So Tim and I will both spend next week preparing for our departure, both emotionally and in practical ways as we finalize the graduation preparations. Next fall, he heads off for the first time in his life to a school that I did not attend and cannot picture. Since I went to private school and he'll go to public, I don't know the smell of the hallways or the color of the auditorium seats or where the buses load at the end of the day. This time Tim will learn it all for himself.

But really, he did last time, too. My notion that I knew all about our local school was an illusion. it was a good nine years, but things are more complicated than I anticipated. There were good parts and bad parts, and next week, as the other graduation volunteers and I confirm with the photographer, proofread the programs, and watch the kids head off on their daylong beach trip, Tim will be saying goodbye to teachers and acknowledging that there are friends he will hardly ever see next year. Eighth grade graduation is hardly a notable accomplishment. The truth is pretty much anyone can pull it off. But it's a milestone nonetheless.

Parent-teacher conferences, one last time

As usual, I was a little lost trying to find my daughter’s fifth grade classroom. This entire second-floor wing didn’t exist when I attended school here myself – in fact, the building that housed my fifth grade classroom is now the subject of townwide debate as to whether it should be preserved as a historical artifact or simply torn down – and I can never remember which stairwell leads to which part of the fifth grade area.

So the thought that this was probably the last time I’d have to try to find Holly’s classroom as I hurried to our parent-teacher conference was momentarily encouraging. Our school does conferences in December and March; this might be my last visit to the classroom all year, and if I do go back for some kind of end-of-year event, there will probably be lots of other parents I can follow.

But the relief of thinking I’d never again get lost on my way to a parent-teacher conference was fleeting, because right after it came the realization that it wasn’t just a matter of knowing other parts of the campus better than the fifth grade section. The reality was that this might have been my last parent-teacher conference ever, since middle school teachers typically don’t schedule conferences with parents.

It was yet another milestone moment, just one of many I seem to experience throughout every school year, but perhaps especially this year, with Tim about to graduate from eighth grade and Holly on her way to middle school. Parent-teacher conferences have been a semi-yearly event for me throughout the better part of the past decade. Could this really be the final one?

In those first few years of school, conferences seemed profoundly important. The chance to sit down alone with my child’s teacher and hear all about what he or she was doing – their strengths, their weaknesses, their interactions with peers, their typical attitude throughout the school day – was a source of fascination, an opportunity to spend twenty whole minutes learning about an objective adult’s impressions of my child. Conferences in kindergarten and first grade carried the same excitement as the kids’ first few infancy check-ups: the two-week visit, the four-week visit, the six-month visit. How much weight has he gained? What percentile? What new developmental milestones can we record?

Of course, whether it’s parent-teacher conferences or infant physicals, it’s fun when everything is going well. The fact that I enjoy these opportunities only underscores how fortunate I’ve been as a parent to have healthy babies who grew into smart, cooperative schoolchildren. My delight in getting to hear other adults’ impressions of them, whether medical or educational, is duly tempered by the awareness that it’s sheer luck of the draw that enables me to sit and beam over my child’s math scores or latest attempts at haiku while another parent is poring over troublesome x-rays or proof of inability to read. There’s no reason I get the fun meetings while another parent gets the other kind. It’s just another thing to be both mystified by and grateful for in equal measure.

Now, though, enough years have gone by that parent-teacher conferences aren’t quite as exciting as they once were. I still love to talk with Holly’s teachers, and I still find it flattering when they compliment her, but a part of me realizes by now that no parent-teacher conference can possibly give a parent everything she wants. No teacher can promise that good test scores in fifth grade assure top marks in middle school. Or that a ready willingness to play with the new kid at recess means she’ll never get caught up in bullying behaviors in the lunchroom. Or even that one teacher’s overall enthusiasm about my child means that she’ll always be well-liked and treated so kindly.

Maybe I’ll miss these meetings when the next parent-teacher conference day rolls around and I realize my family has aged out, or maybe I’ll feel like we have enough perspective on our children as parents not to need the feedback from professionals that once seemed so valuable. Tim starts high school in six months, and from what I understand, we’ll know a lot less about what’s going on at school in general after that. It will be his world, not ours, and no one will feel obligated to report back to us, other than through that most linear of metrics, report cards.

I hope I’m ready for that change. Their school has treated them wonderfully, and I’ve enjoyed every opportunity I’ve had over the years to sit down with their teachers. But it’s time to move on now: for them, and for me as well. They need to learn that success means trying hard even long past the point where anyone hands you a report card. And I need to learn that being proud of your children doesn’t require a scheduled meeting to review their performance as much as it just means observing, appreciating, and celebrating.

"You're only as happy as your least happy kid"

At dinnertime, night after night this autumn, the kids trip over each other to tell stories about their day at school. They interrupt each other; they even interrupt themselves. They don’t interrupt their parents only because we sit there silently listening, nodding attentively but, at least in my case, secretly marveling at the miracle of their apparently unadulterated happiness.

Tim wants to talk about Math League, Writers’ Guild, helping out in the first grade gym classes, an idea for the eighth grade science fair. Holly cuts in to tell us about a recess game, a science quiz, a plan she and a friend made to dress alike the next day.

And while I act like it’s all perfectly normal, as I listen I just can’t get over their contentment. Over and over again, I repeat silently to myself, nothing beats having kids who are happy at school.

Although you wouldn’t know it from our dinnertime conversation, there’s plenty to worry about and plenty of problems on which to dwell, and more than enough sadness and anxiety to go around: locally, nationally, globally. Whether it comes via a friend’s phone call or an NPR broadcast, bad news happens all around us. And somehow it seems impossible that my two children can be so happy right now.

But they are. They like what they’re learning and doing in school; they value their friends; they bear a notable absence of fear. They’re not worried about the price of college or the prevalence of cancer or the fiscal cliff. They’re just….happy.

Yes, it’s remarkably self-absorbed and solipsistic. But, to paraphrase Ferris Bueller, so’s childhood. An acquaintance recently made a comment that I had never heard before, though he claimed it was nothing original: You’re only as happy as your least happy kid.

So maybe that’s what it is. I have plenty to worry about; we all do. Every sentient adult recognizes the peril and fragility all around us. And yet….my kids are happy these days. Really happy. If you’re only as happy as your least happy kid, it’s no wonder I end most days with a sense of peace despite all that I could instead be focusing on. My kids are happy, and so in many respects, I’m happy too. They’ll have darker times and so will I. But this fall, they’ve got math league and community service and dress-alike day at school, and it’s all good. For them, and by extension, for me.

Sobering contrasts

It was the strangest and most unsettling coincidental juxtaposition of events, and yet hundreds of parents in our community experienced it this week: transitioning in the course of twenty-four hours from a wake to a funeral to Parents’ Night at school.

In a matter of hours, we moved ourselves from something none of us could have imagined we’d be doing to something all of us take for granted as we proceeded from the service for a 43-year-old father who died suddenly over the weekend to a conversation about math concepts and reading groups.

And yet as sad as we are all feeling, there was something profound about the inadvertent timing of events. It reminded us of the extremes that can affect our children’s lives. The death of a parent: just about the worst thing imaginable to happen to a ten-year-old. A new year of school: stimulating, exciting, full of possibilities and new things to learn.

For those of us who had gone from the wake on Wednesday to the funeral on Thursday to Parents’ Night on Thursday evening – and it appeared to me that there were hundreds in that category – it was a matter of doing what needed to be done: paying tribute to a friend with crushing sorrow, and then sitting down in our kids’ classrooms to hear about what lies ahead for them this year.

Our school takes good care of its kids, intellectually but also socially and emotionally. At Parents’ Night, the focus was exclusively on middle school curriculum. But earlier in the week, there were emails and articles from the school to help us talk to our children about grief. There were opportunities for the kids to talk to guidance counselors. There were school psychologists visiting the classrooms to help the kids try to understand tragedy.

Both experiences – the school’s emergency response and the calm familiarity of Parents’ Night – reminded me that overseeing children’s well-being is a complicated responsibility, for parents and schools alike. We do our best, sometimes in the most difficult circumstances and sometimes, as in the case of teachers who welcome parents to their annual presentation year after year, under the most familiar circumstances. It’s been a painful week for many of us, but Parents’ Night was a soothing reminder that almost without exception, we send our children off every day to a safe, stimulating and nurturing place.

 

The scent of school

Maybe it’s because this unseasonably warm weather gives the sense that the end of the school year is closer at hand than it is, or maybe it’s because most of my volunteer duties at school – the seventh grade play, fourth grade band coverage – are over for the time being, and my next big school-related job – chairing the teacher appreciation luncheon in June – is still months away. But whatever the reason, I was feeling uncharacteristically sentimental as I made my way through the middle school hallway en route to the cafeteria to do my monthly stint as fourth grade lunch/recess volunteer yesterday.

There was a time when I thought any visit to the school would make me feel sentimental. It was my childhood school for nine years, after all, from kindergarten through eighth grade. And so when we started preparing to send Tim to kindergarten and I made those first few visits to the campus to learn about what kindergarten was like in Carlisle in the 21st century, I misted up with nostalgia. And I thought I’d always be like that.

But in the ensuing years, the wash of nostalgia has subsided. Now the school is no longer the setting of my ever-so-slightly-faded childhood memories; it’s the place where my children spend 180 days a year, and much of the sentimentality I once felt about sending them there has been subsumed in the reality that defines the ins and outs of public schooling. I genuinely believe we have a wonderful school system, and I am profoundly appreciative to be able to send my kids to this school. And yet the comparisons with sausage-making are inevitable: being immersed in the quotidian concerns of school life certainly takes away some of the dewy-eyed nostalgia. There are MCAS scores to contemplate, discipline issues to deal with, matters of friendship and bullying and everything that falls between the two to try to understand, and seemingly endless volunteer needs to help fill.

So my recent visits to campus have been a little less nostalgic than my earlier ones.

Yesterday was different, though. The sun was bright and the air warm; my job was to stand out at recess and keep an eye on the third graders. They played tag and soccer and had races; it’s easy to see how we have such a fit student population, given the time they spend running on the school plaza during recess. The smell of the middle school hallway reminded me of how happy I often was during my own days as a child there. I remember a feeling of excitement during so much of the time I spent at school: when I was younger it was about wondering what new opportunities would arise in the classroom from day to day, and then in middle school years it was more related to my social life, but there was always a sense that something interesting was about to happen. Even then, I found our school a comforting place and I was proud of it.

All of those feelings came back to me yesterday, replacing the general sense of weariness I’d developed over a long winter of dealing with school-related issues. Even during years as good as both my kids are having, in fourth and seventh grade, it seems there’s always something causing a little bit of turmoil.

But not yesterday. Yesterday, the school felt like the same engaging and cheerful place it had been back in first grade when my teacher created amazing murals with soap and washable paint on the classroom windows; back in fourth grade when friends and I wrote and performed our own play for the class; back in sixth grade when the posters went up for our first school dance. As I tell my childhood friends who did not move back to town and still have their own misty-eyed memories of our old school, it’s not Disney World. It’s a real place with both positives and negatives, and to get too nostalgic is to misunderstand how complicated a public school system can be in this day and age.

At the same time, sometimes it doesn’t feel complicated at all. Sometimes it just feels...well, like home.

Classroom time

My sister Sarah recounted the story yesterday of being invited into her 7-year-old’s classroom as a volunteer reader. Her son was so apprehensive about how she would perform that he devised a series of coded hand signals that would signify whether she was reading too fast, too slow, too quiet, too loud, with too much animation, with too little animation, with too much or too little time to look at the pictures, and so forth. “He was so worried that I was going to embarrass him. It’s a far cry from when he was so excited to have me come into the classroom to read that I could barely peel him off of me far enough to see the pages,” she said.

Hearing her talk about it reminded me of the days when I used to help out in my kids’ classrooms a lot – and then less so – and now barely ever. Tim’s kindergarten teacher liked quite a lot of parental help. It was her first year at our school, and she had come from a school system in which every teacher had a classroom aide, which she no longer did. So she was accustomed to having a second adult in the classroom at all times and tried to fill the gap as much as possible with parents.

It was difficult because then, Tim was the way Sarah described Andrew being prior to now: he was always so happy to see me come into the classroom that it was difficult when I had to leave after my prescribed hour or two. Once, in anticipation of a problem, I discussed it with him ahead of time.

“Tim, I can come in and help only if you promise not to cling,” I said that day.

“Mooooommmmm,” he droned with a tinge of contempt, and I was sure he was about to insist he was no clinger. Instead, he said, “Evvvvverryone clings when their mom comes into the classroom.”

Well, that may have been true when he was in kindergarten, but seven years later, things are a lot different. The teachers don’t want or need us around much anymore, and the kids are even less enthusiastic about our presence, though Tim usually endures my rare appearances at middle school without much complaining. Earlier this month, one of his classes decided to have a potluck lunch in honor of Thanksgiving; I had the job of bringing in the pies he’d made earlier in the week. Once there, I was so curious to see how his classmates had changed since I’d last seen them – months or sometimes years earlier – that I could hardly tear myself away, until I committed a key error. “Claire, you’re dressed for the beach!” I said to one girl who was inexplicably wearing a sundress in mid-November. The teacher pressed his lips together; too late I remembered that another teacher had told me years earlier that teachers are forbidden from commenting on kids’ clothing, or at least what girls are wearing. Parents don’t fall under the same restrictions, but I had still overstepped my bounds as a classroom visitor.

In any case, with middle schoolers, the issue of school volunteering evolves into a very different paradigm: where once our presence was needed as reading helpers or project assistants, now we’re called upon most often not by the teachers but by the kids, and it’s for one critical role: to chaperone their dances. Every time a dance comes up on the schedule, the administration threatens that if the kids don’t rummage up the proper number of chaperones, the event will be canceled, so all the kids feel pressured to call in favors. And then, of course, they face the ultimate dilemma of which prospect is worse: having your mother at a school dance or having no school dance at all.

Tim actually doesn’t mind having me chaperone when my turn comes up, which I try to make happen no more than once a year, and Holly is generally neutral about my visits to school. I can’t say I miss the early days when we were urged to come in at least once a week to help out, but I do appreciate the occasional chance to take a peek at what’s going on. Soon enough, the invitations into the classroom will dwindle down to once a year on parents’ day at the most, depending on my kids’ specific educational future. So I’ll continue to enjoy the time I spend at school with my kids. And, just like the teachers, with enough practice I’ll even learn to hold my tongue when their classmates show up in sandals, midwinter.