Rose Back To School

Some of you were surprised to hear that Rose started school this week. I am too! It was a rather quick decision, once we made it, to have her start in the 4th grade at our neighborhood school.

We had just watched the movie Matilda, starring Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman and based on the book of the same name by Roald Dahl. Matilda is a little girl who is very different from her family. She loves books and they love TV. She loves flowers and they love World Wrestling Federation. She has a hard time growing up in a family where she sticks out like a sore thumb.

I told the kids I kind of felt that way when I was a kid, being the only big reader in my family. They were both surprised that sometimes my parents made me put down my books and do something else! (Which, I have to do sometimes with Elijah too, but in the movie Matilda it looks really awful when the parents do this.)

Well, in talking about how different I felt in my family, I (again) realized how different Rose must feel sometimes around Elijah and me. She’s a doer more than a reader. She’s very, very social and it wouldn’t be too much for her to have a friend over every single day, all day, whereas for me and Elijah if we schedule two “play dates” at our house a week we are exhausted (that, combined with 1-2 homeschool co-ops a week and evening activities, mind you). Rose watches the rest of us read and just wants to explode. She doesn’t want to spend hours a day reading! We are just so boring for her…

So during this post-movie discussion, which came in this extra-boring month of February, I said to Rose, “maybe you should go to school?” To which she said in her very confident way, “yes, mom, I need to”. And she said “I feel like the only way to get a good education is to go to school.” (ha! more on that later) And “Mom, I want to go to the neighborhood school so I can meet more friends in the neighborhood.” (Instead of the school she was at before, where her Dad teaches.) Well, I said, “why don’t you start next week? I’ll call the principal and we’ll get it all set up.” There’s no time like the present, right?

We decided to keep her home on her birthday so we could do the ear piercing and shopping trip we’d planned, but she’d start the next day, Tuesday. The principal was very gracious about it all, and we planned to meet with him and get a school tour Monday morning. Which went well. Her teacher and all the kids in the class were delighted to meet her and welcome her in. From our visit, I could tell she’s in a great classroom where the kids feel free to move around, and they are still excited to learn, raising their hands and jumping around in their seats with an answer.

The first day she was nervous that the work would be hard because she “hadn’t kept up” while home schooling. (To be honest, I was nervous about this too, as any home schooling mom would be.) About everything else, she was confident as could be, though. Rose is generally adored by her teachers and makes friends easily, and in this day and age when kids are moved around a lot, joining school in the middle of the year is no.big.deal at all.

Well, she came home the first day surprised that everything was so easy. She aced the spelling pre-test, she found math to be no problem, and the geography stuff they’re learning is “almost dumb, mom”. Ha! Ha! Haha! I knew it all along, didn’t I? We were doing just fine with home schooling. I would *never* worry about that again. As I’ve said many times, keeping up with the public schools does not involve too much work. So much of their day is spend doing “crowd control” that learning, while it is done and the teachers are great, is given little time.

She is enjoying school, and it does meet some needs for her. She loves being busy, and moving from thing to thing all day--something I have a very hard time providing for her at home as I need a lot of downtime and prefer to learn by reading and other quiet pursuits.

The worst thing so far is that she comes home from school, as in the past, so wired and tense from being "good" all day. She’s like a rocket about to explode, and if we don’t do something to release all that tension she behaves very badly and is very cranky. Last night after a few hours of her being very crabby with us, I finally just held her and said she could kick and scream and hollar all she wants but I was going to hold her tight the whole time. It was exactly like a mom holding a 2-year old during a tantrum, providing a calming presence to help him/her stop tantruming. Well, she did kick and scream and cry to be set free, but I held her all the way till she calmed down. And it worked--the entire rest of the evening she was her old, relaxed self again. And even I felt like I’d had a release of stress!

So what we’ve decided to do to deal with all that stress and tension is to make her get some exercise each afternoon when she gets home, first thing and before I even ask her about homework. She can play with the dog, run around the block, jump on the mini-trampoline, dance to the radio, or whatever. Instead of “threatening” to take her out of school, I will learn to help her deal with her day’s stress in productive ways. This is a good lesson for me, too. We'll keep taking it all one year at a time, and who knows, maybe she'll be back home with us someday?

Now if homework would just get done without any fight…(I hate homework! But, if she’s gonna do school, she’s gonna do the work.)

P.S. I'm back to the blogging, as you can tell. But, I'm trying to blog without obligation and pressure on myself. I may be less regular about it, but I'll still be here.