It's That Time of Year...Again
You know the time of year — when everyone starts hearing about where their kids are going to go to school, whether Susie will be accepted into the $30,000 private girls' school or Charlie into the charter that got 1000 applications. Whether the school Hiram is in is attending to his reading deficits or whether Sally needs two or three days worth of math tutoring. I guess if it weren't for the fact that one of my children is severely disabled and I've had to make some pretty enormous compromises regarding her education, I might have the paranoid perspective that many of my friends have. I'm also sort of grateful, actually, that I don't have near enough money to even afford these private schools such is the anxiety I see and hear spilling out.
I probably have at least one conversation every single day with someone who is worried, kvetching, complaining, bragging or something or other about their son or daughter's school. Frankly, I'm tired of it. I want to SCREAM:
It's FOURTH GRADE PEOPLE!
I want to scream other things as well, but I don't. About entitlement and over-parenting and just what do you really remember about elementary and middle school and how is that carried on into your life at present? I actually loved my fourth grade year. In fact, I loved it so much that "four" became my favorite number. I had Mrs. Delp (four letters); our class was Room 4. I tried out and won the role of Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz in the school play. And while I remember that I sort of had a crush on a kid named Billy Hall with blonde as straw hair, and I was in awe of a girl named Julie Devin, who lived with her hippie mother in an incense infused apartment, and another girl named Shawna Gidwani was a real live immigrant from India, I don't really remember much about what I was actually doing all day. And I doubt my mother does either. I doubt that she thought about it much then, either.
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